Endings (or, Middlings)

Happy summer. Happy solstice. Happy most light of the year.

My birthday falls right after summer solstice, so it has always felt like the close of one year for me and the beginning of the next. This year, it also marks my last week of farming. Whenever I say that, I keep adding “at least for now” or “in my current capacity” or “I mean, I’ll be around, I’m sure I’ll be farming a bit” —all attempts to lighten the finality of it, and all true. But this was, really, my last week of farming. Today—solstice itself, the longest day of the year and three days before my thirty-seventh birthday—is my first day officially not on the Winter Sister Farm schedule.

In the first newsletter I wrote for the farm, three years ago, I wondered “if I am really ready to never be done.” Which has always been the joke of farming. “Did you finish the farm?” Anna’s old boss used to ask the crew at the end of the day. Three years ago I was already stressed out about the projects I’d started and not finished, in particular “one last stretch of fence that just keeps not getting stretched.” It still isn’t stretched. And I suspect that one can similarly never really be done with farming. So what I’m wrapping up is maybe only a season of farming, slightly offset from the actual CSA season we finished a month ago. I’m finishing the season where I ran around in the sun turning valves on and off, where I made long lists of irrigation and machine parts on my phone, where I spent about as much time tightening the loose nut on the spader as I did actually spading. The next season is going to be different and I can’t predict how, except I think there will be fewer valves. But what will there be more of? Maybe time. Maybe mental space, maybe not—I’m pretty good at filling that up. There will be different problems. I’ll be healthier in some ways, less healthy in others. I bet my screen time will increase, and that my back will be less sore. I bet I’ll feel, regularly, a tremendous sense of unease and unproductivity. I’ll probably have to redefine productivity. I’ll take better care of my yard. Maybe I’ll finish the fence.

I also wrote in that first newsletter that “In the midst of all the beginnings, we have to take our endings where we can get them. The end of the day, the end of a row, the end of an argument.” I’m feeling the opposite, too, that in the midst of so much ending, I need to find my beginnings. Though it’s true that every ending is a beginning, it doesn’t feel evenly balanced between the two yet. The ending is so specific—I know exactly what I’m leaving, because I did it. Though the details are a bit of a blur, I was there, in the field, in the spreadsheets, in the packshed. Whatever is beginning today, on this solstice, is still theoretical, though perhaps only for a few more hours. After that, I’ll be in whatever’s next (and also on my way north to backpack for a few days.) I’ve spent a lot of the last few months trying not to imagine too hard into this time. I’ve thought about work, and applied to jobs, but all with a kind of loose hold, like I may or may not do any of it. Right now—-now!----I switch from not doing to doing, even if what I’m doing isn’t much yet. I picked a good day for the transition, I think. I’ve got a lot of hours of daylight left.

This is also my last newsletter for now. Maybe I’ll feel inspired to write one down the line at some point, but the purpose of this form for me has been to connect my daily experience of farming to the bigger experience of being human. Without the daily farming, I’ll just be figuring out the human stuff, and any thoughts I have about that I think are best to save for my journal. But I’ve so appreciated the opportunity to write these little musings, and the sweet feedback I’ve received along the way. Thank you for reading.

I suppose I don’t know anymore if I’m trying to write about endings or beginnings or just the whole long string of them that makes up the middle. Every day is its own little arc, and the farming season is full of beginnings, one after another, all season long. Every seed that germinates is a beginning, and every harvest an end. Farming is not a process that starts and stops but one long relationship that takes both forever and split seconds. The hour after hour on the tractor, and the moments of sprinting toward an irrigation blowout. All underlaid by the mysterious, godlike soil that is our foundation, that has no beginning or end, at least not discernible by me.

My big feeling about my big ending is already starting to feel less solid. It already mostly happened. I’ve been on the brink of it for so long now, and in the end nothing is actually ending but my particular little role. The farm is chugging along; the work is getting done. The middleness is starting to creep in, as it should on the first day of summer, halfway through 2024. We’ve spent the last few days weeding, the truest sign of the middle. I’m thinking of all the farmers who have been planting since March and whose seasons are just getting going in earnest. I’m wishing them fresh bouts of energy in the afternoon, good nights of sleep, a deep breath here and there. There is always an end of some kind in sight, as a little oasis, and once you get there there is always another glitter on the horizon.

Happy middling.

Love,

Sarah

Cease