Another year gone by.
It's easy to begin thinking about all the things I'd like to do with my time over the winter, but it's also hard to take that last look at the empty fields. Every season I reap another set of memories from them. There were quiet mornings weeding at 6am when no one's coffee had kicked in yet, but we wanted to beat the coming summer heat. Aidan once played The Ants Go Marching on a blade of grass while we waited for a new load of plants to transplant. We sat in the shade and laughed. Daren and I revisited the old ways in Spring when Ted sent us to plant dozens of rows of potatoes by hand. In fact, I can look at any field and recite all the things that have happened there somewhere in the past.
This year's highlight was meeting many new friends in NYC. It has inspired me to want to know folks from other sites since Prospect Heights has hosted the crew two years now and it my main city contact. There are six others, some of whom I've met in passing at our harvest party, but would like to visit personally and bring a canning workshop to.
I could easily get carried away with thoughts. We grew the largest celeriac this year, but still argue that it's hardly a valuable achievement, I mean we don't get e-mails saying "send more celeriac!" It's a farmer-pride-thing. Big vegetables, straight rows, and weedless beds just mean that at the end of a day you can sit back with a cold Saranac and smile while the sun sets. There's no more to do.
And so there is no more to do. Winter will soon take over, and as soon as I've settled into my ways, the itch will come back and I'll be eager to return for a new season. Farming holds some power.
Reciting what happened in the past makes me think of our tunnel-naming system. Whenever we build a new batch of tunnels, we refer to them according to what they grew that first year, even when we rotate crops. Like this year, the 'flower tunnels' grew mostly tomatoes (and apparently that is not enough to get them called tomato tunnels). Sometimes the past holds a strange amount of strength over us.
ReplyDeletePS- or a cold Bud, for those of us with lessy picky palates (and tighter budgets). Haha.
Well-spoken...captures my mood right now! Farming holds some power. Nothin like driving a tractor early in the morning, you can feel like a king (or queen, I guess).