The first day of fall came and went a few days ago, with a flurry of exciting activity, selling yearlings and enjoying the sweet coolness of the beginning of a new season. A lot of people brace for the end of the summer. I suppose I kind of understand it. I guess I do too, a little. Not every summer, but summers like this one. The warmth, the rainstorms that have kept us green, the ease of accomplishing basic tasks, the colors and sights and sounds and tastes of summertime. The fruitfulness.
I have enjoyed (almost) the last of the flowers of my hail-wrecked garden – To my delight, a number of my plants bloomed again, and I was able to cut yet another bouquet for the kitchen. There is something about fresh-cut flowers that touches my little soul and delights the eyes, and when I’ve grown them myself, cared for them and cultivated them, it is an even keener enjoyment.
The garden is slowly slowing down, as the fruit harvest is in full swing. This is where the fun really is…Because now the summer can wind itself away, and winter can wind itself up, and we’ll still be tasting the fruit of summertime. The early summer fruits like chokecherries prep us for the pouring-in of everything in the fall.
Salsa, and basil, dried apples and the abundance of apples that will be frozen for pies are just some of the evidence of the wonderful bounty of this year! Days have been filled with picking and washing and processing gallons upon gallons of fruit, hawthorn berries and plums and apples, into things we will enjoy for months and potentially years – butters and jams and juices and fruit for pies. A gallon jar of apple scrap vinegar is brewing on the counter, and I have finally started waterglassing eggs from the summer abundance, which will hopefully allow me to continue to fill customer orders with fresh eggs over the slump of the winter, and Brad and I can eat and use the glassed eggs.
Winter doesn’t seem as long, when you can continue to enjoy the summer, even after it is gone.
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Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle, September 13, 2023
Down in the yard below the house, mama cows with their hale and hearty calves come in to water at the tank in the horse corral. Some do the cow version of a sneak, some run like they’ve got someplace to be, and some chit-chat as they mosey in. It is a pleasant sight, and one we haven’t seen for months. It signals a change.
The springtime branding season closes with cows and calves getting moved into their summer pastures – a bittersweet event but rather a relief to have them out from underfoot. They become obnoxiously like oversized pets, hanging around the yard all calving season and getting into things in significant and irritating ways. They spend the summer dispersed in the pastures farthest away from home, on the periphery of the ranch, or hauled to more remote leases as many ranchers do. The reasonably self-sufficient critters spend the summer eating and fattening, nursing a calf and growing another, with pretty minimal human contact, if they behave themselves, which inevitably they don’t.
Summertime is a constant flurry of activity—by turns exciting, fun, tiresome, defeating, delightful, and harrowing—something always happening, something always needing attention, whether it is the constant need to be flowing water to something somewhere, animal or plant, especially in drier parts of the summer, or the constant, endless tasks around the house and yard, or the constant harvesting from the garden, or working on weeds in the pastures, or cleaning up after a destructive storm. Work ends for the day notwhen there isn’t more work to do, but when you just have to be done. Then there’s the constant cropping up of half days spent fixing problems cows created. They create their share.
Gathering up animals that took a social day with the neighbor’s cows, for instance, or gathering up a neighbor’s animal that took a social day with ours, haphazardly steals anywhere from a few hours to a half day here and there. Working through a remote herd to find the handful that are sick and doctoring them in their summer pastures can easily become a half or a full day of work, if not several. Even regular water checks and patching holes in the fence take up a surprising amount of time. Then there are the bursts of neighborly days helping each other get done the necessary and larger tasks, trailing whole herds of cows in from their summer pastures, rounding them up on horseback and bringing them down to the corrals to vaccinate calves, treat everything for flies, and doctor any sick animals.
But all that shifts at the end of the summer, when the cows are brought home for good.
Summer has been wrapping itself up over the last few weeks, and we’ve had our first truly cool nights of the season, when temps have dipped down into blanket-worthy digits. We’ve been a mere handful of degrees away from a frost out here by Hermosa, and I can see breath on our early morning starts. Fruit is ripening everywhere, and the harvest is getting put up, evidenced by the gleaming jars on the countertops and bags of frozen produce in the freezer. One more time mowing the lawn and that’ll do it for the rest of the year.
We need the seasons. We need the shifting of the weather, the changes in the temperatures, the change in the work, the traditions and customs that come, each in its own time. We need the fire and flurry of summer, just like we need the chill and sleep of winter. We need the waking of springtime, just like we need the slowing down of autumn. Each season brings its own challenges and graces, as the year cycles through periods of renewal, of change, of struggle, of ease. The fiery heat to remind us of the beauty of the snow, and the bitter cold to make us long for the heat. The dry months to make us appreciate the rain. Relentless sun to cause us to enjoy the clouds. Bare trees of winter to make us dream of spring. The shadows have been lengthening out with that strange slant of the light that means chilly mornings, cozy evenings, and fingers warming around mugs of something hot. The Big Dipper has been righted in the northwestern sky, no longer pouring out constantly on a thirsty world. Soon Orion will greet us from his place above the eastern horizon in the later evening. There is that spice in the air, that unmistakable taste of fall. And down at the water tank, cows and their calves are coming in to drink, sleek with a layer of summer fat under their glossy black hides. Summer is coming to an end when the cows are coming home.
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Not every year is a good plum year, so I am delighted to say we went a little wild with the plums the last few weeks…I wouldn’t be surprised if we were pushing twenty gallons of plums picked…easily fifteen.
A thicket in the hayfield that doesn’t generally produce produced like crazy, and we also had access to a beautiful plum tree on Hart Ranch that apparently was always thought to be a cherry tree but isn’t. It produced the most delicious plums I’ve ever had.
We now have plums in the freezer for pies and such, canned pie filling, plum butter, plum jam, and (today’s project) three gallons of juice, for kombucha making and for drinking. It is reminiscent of grapefruit juice and is great hot! I’m thinking hot cider, but plum juice…
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Brad was up north in the hayfield starting to move hay into the stackyard, and called me to let me know that the plum thickets in the hayfield were full of ripe fruit! I loaded up the fourwheeler with the three dogs and buckets for picking and up we buzzed, like a little mobile circus.
It turns out what Brad was seeing were actually hawthorns, beautiful, crimson berries in heavy clusters, but the plums were ripe as well, so we picked both until a thunderstorm shut us down. They were the best wild plums I have ever tasted! I’ll be going back for more.
We got home to no power, so it’ll be a cozy evening cuddled up on the sofa with my husband, watching the lightning and reading to the light of the oil lamps. “No Life for a Lady,” by Agnes Morley Cleaveland will be good company tonight.
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Strangely wonderful, strangely defeating by turns.
Exciting new opportunities have presented themselves, writing for a local newspaper and magazine, shooting more portrait sessions, a wedding. Canning like crazy with the wealth of chokecherries, zucchini, and tomatoes. Baking bread, brewing kombucha, fermenting milk kefir. Productivity and fruitfulness.
A freak hailstorm wiped out my garden a few weeks ago (thankfully my greenhouse survived). I lost four of my precious cats to poison before we figured out where it was coming from. I grafted four TSC chicks onto a broody hen and she took to them readily, only to have my nasty rooster (who is no more) kill three of them a week or two later. Those frustrating defeats.
And then days like today, when this is the bountiful harvest reaped, reset things a little. Eggs from my chickens, tomatoes and jalapeños from my greenhouse, and succulent wild plums from the road ditch.
Isn’t this a beautiful sight?
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Originally printed in Custer County Chronicle, July 19, 2023
“It is a year for the books,” a lot of people are saying. Looking down from the house towards the barn, the yard is a peaceful chaos of color and activity, a stark contrast to the dull and lifeless landscape of last year. The smell of fresh-cut hay is heavy and sweet, the birds are noisily serenading themselves, and the two roosters down by the henhouse are just full of it and sharing it with everyone else. My little flock of pullets started to lay in the last few days, adding their pretty eggs to the basket and joining the ranks of the laying hens. A robin ruffles his feathers in the spray from the sprinkler watering the flowers, and the vegetable garden is a fruitful jungle: bright yellow dill towering above the hail netting, the zucchini and yellow squash overflowing from the stock tank they’re growing in, zinnias and poppies shining their bright faces up at the sun. The little greenhouse is bursting at the seams. A few of the horses below strike up a heated conversation for a moment, and one of the puppies harasses the steer or barks at a buzzard. A delightful chaos. And there, soft in the background, is the comfortable whirr of the rake and the baler, the hayfield in the distance studded with bale upon bale of hay.
What a sight.
What a year.
This time a year ago, we were just trying to keep everything alive. A tough calving season was followed by bleak drought, the worst that a lot of folks around here had ever seen. Pastures basically stopped growing in June, if they ever really grew to begin with. Hay crops were devastatingly low, and we didn’t even try mowing half of our hay ground. Driving across the ranch or down Highway 79 left a little knot in the pit of the stomach, seeing the dust and the cured-out grasses. And if it wasn’t tough enough already, the grasshoppers moved in, demolishing gardens and thinning the already thin pastures. The summer became a game of just trying to stave off some of the effects of the drought, struggling to keep water in front of thirsty cows, and at the end of it all there was very little to show for anything. Stackyards were empty, dams were low, herd numbers were forced to dwindle, and pastures were worn out. Winter, then, was the struggle of trying to keep weight on hungry cows, and then trying to keep calves alive in the snowstorms. It was a tough year. A tight year. One of those years where the inputs and outputs were wildly disproportionate, where all the best efforts and the gallons of sweat didn’t mean a thing. Or they sure didn’t seem to.
I love talking to people who have been around the sun a few more times than I have, people who have seen their share of drought and storm and life in general. They have a longer perspective than I often have, a longer perspective than I am able to have. They’re the ones who can say, with the voice of experience, “It’s just what it does.” The ones who have seen the brink of disaster, but who have also seen what followed. They have weathered the worst without breaking.
Because those best efforts and gallons of sweat do mean something.
Maybe the effort felt wasted, or the sweat dried and everything was still the same or even worse, but days, weeks, months, and years of challenge and difficulty prime us for receiving the good years, or months, or weeks, or days. Sometimes, because we have stubborn hearts and blind eyes, we don’t see the good or fully appreciate it, until and unless we have something to compare it to. Last year gave us something to compare to.
So even as I take a break from chores and look down over the greenness and fruitfulness of the garden and hayfields, and see the sleek cows, well-summered, and soak in the peace that is this year, the sense of relief seeing water in Spring Creek and hay in the stackyards and water in the dams, even as I enjoy the satisfaction of a fruitful harvest without a fight, I’m thankful. Thankful for this year, of course, for answered prayers and work that is fruitful. But it isn’t just this year I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for last year, for the struggle that it was, for the difficulty and challenge that makes this year that much sweeter.
The years like this one might be the pleasantest, and they are certainly the kinds of years we pray for. But it is in those tough years where faith is strengthened, where resilience is born, where endurance is built, where the ability to cling tight to the things that matter is cultivated, and where strong individuals, families, and communities are made. That effort, that sweat, is never wasted. Those are the times that make us.
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