Fall Visitors

Oh, Boy, Mike B. and Diane M. are coming for a visit.  It's a great day for a walk in the woods and a lunch before they depart later this afternoon.  Here's a little fall poem to announce their coming.

We have stretched a tarp over the farm.
It covers the rush of last summer's
Produce tucked into cellar
Jars and freezer bags.
A mist settles over the marsh
Cattails wave more slowly wetted
And the cattle are milling
Now, their favorite bedding,
Reed canary grass, matted;
No longer a comfort from the wind.
Chickens seem to notice
Scratching like crazy
Forlorn too as the crawlers
Dig in from the push of frost.
Colors evaporating
Air filling with earth-tone smells
Trees stretching silenced by sun's
Abandonment, while I linger
Inside bidding farewell
In this prayer.

Ron and Lyn on Blue Moon Farm....

Falling

That seems like an ironic title for this time of year.  I'm seeing the trees bare themselves in public now and the nighttime  temperatures have dropped five degrees on average each of the last weeks since early September.  Yet, there is an uplifting feeling this time of year that cannot be escaped.  I've talked to some of the feelings of men in the fall.  The return or youthfulness that comes with the urgency to gather and store, sort and take stock, and arrange the territory for the great shoveling that is about to begin; again.

Here, in Northwestern Minnesota as in other places above the 45th Parallel, winter sneaks in and out for a month or two before settling in for the duration ending about the time the May Pole goes up.  The Meteor Guys and Dolls talk about the great mixing that happens above that mid latitude.  The Gulf sending up moisture, the `Buesselers in Alaska sending down arctic air masses all overlapping in my back yard or maybe yours too.  It's a mess really.  Nothing feels consistent and I suspect we experience a type of 'conditional anxiety' for it all and that is what makes the hearts of men pound in their ears at night and drive their actions during the day.

From childhood I have been motivated in The Fall.  Hunting squirrels with my father as a youngster; carrying the old BB gun while my older brother had the Stevens .22 single shot and dad his Mossberg manlicker seven-shot bolt action may have set the stage for the anticipation that grabs onto me each Fall and hangs on until I am housebound or have stockpiled enough to satisfy the urgency of the season.  Bowhunting with Mike during those high school and college years didn't help.  We attended the homemade tree stands way more often than classes and never felt missed during a professorial lecture or meal call with our fellow dorm mates.  Now, in these "senior moments" nothing seems changed.  I peer out at the marsh and distant woodlots from this farmhouse living room and I'm torn between hooking up the boat or putting on the chaps for  a grouse hunt in this light rain wetting the colors dignifying each species of plant in view.  Farm chores call to me too and don't seem like "chores" anymore than the recreation I'm contemplating.  Outside is the draw, not the action taken on arrival.  We want to be part of the departing summer.  We want to push our luck with the fall, falling and fallen all around.  It's a recycling of the energy we have stored from all the fine eating of fresh summer garden vegetables;  the handling of the free-range chicken eggs; the moving of the cattle from one paddock to the next listening to them munch their way in circles around the the fence lines.  Each growing black calf in it's mother's tow mimicking and suckling and learning the ways of the herd. 

I'm inclined now to throw out a proposition.  Let's say we go toward the urgency of Fall for a while and see what sorts itself out of the millions of choices we seem to face each of these perfect days of summer winding down.  Gather back here around the tea cups say in a month and defend out choices for this new month of October.  Let's not linger any longer at the keyboard reminiscing of old times long gone.  Let's make something new of ourselves before the big freeze and maybe, just maybe, we'll have a better sense of the flush of Spring after this impending Winter gives up it's grip and it's signature darkness recedes into the brightness of a new year next April or May.  I think the stories we'll bring to the gathering when November arrives will bring us fortunes better than the telling of the leaves in our teacups that day.  I know I'm ready to participate in Fall.  Aren't you?  Maybe I'll put on my Robert Frost costume and start with a 'gathering of leaves' and some whistling to get a good snort of earthy smells flowing through my nostrils and go from there to all the next things presented in the colored canvass of Fall.  Hi Hooooo.....