On Lateness and Letting Go
Considerations from Sarah, January 2023
I am late again. I had self-imposed equinox and solstice newsletter deadlines, and I’ve let the last two pass. I did so with abandon, though not reckless abandon. The first I wrote but couldn’t manage to send, and the second I meant to write and simply never did. There was always something that seemed more important to do. There were harvests and holidays and cleaning the farmstand to start distribution season. There was a last final flurry of bed prep before the rain came. There was the rain. Fall equinox passed (I’d written about irrigating in a drought but was too overwhelmed by it to finalize a draft) and then the frosts hit, hard. Daily hard frosts for over a month, our crops hunkered like turtles in the field. We had to wait until ten in the morning for the greens to thaw enough to start harvesting, and at four it was already too cold to have the hoops open. It got dark so early that I kept expecting to find myself with free hours to write, but instead I filled them by walking my dog with a headlamp, staring at Quickbooks a lot, and watching low-stakes reality television. It all seemed important at the time.
And so I am late, as I am so often. I go to bed too late and get up too late. I tend to leave my house at the time I said I’d arrive somewhere else. I only recently figured out how tax deductions work (or did I??). The farm overall ran late this year: we harvested potatoes late, we got our hoops up late. We entirely missed the window to harvest our storage carrots before the first hard rain, after which they were sitting in mud and so slow to harvest that it simply wasn’t worth it. This last round of storms put them underwater.
If nothing else, this weather has forced us to let go. That our next seeding of salad mix will be late, and our next lettuce planting, would have been untenably stressful to me a few months ago, but lateness is really a summer game. All summer and fall I move around with grand illusions of control—not the control that I have, but the control I imagine I should have were I a better farmer—and all season I fall just a little behind. In November, right about when the clocks tick backward, time itself changes. Plants stop growing; they simply hold on. Time is no longer the crucial element. The frosts hit, or they don’t. Floods come, or they don’t. There is nothing I can do to stop them except prepare. Winter lays all my imagined order down to rest, and a good series of storms obliterates it completely.
We are late for everything right now, or late to none of it. The number of things I should be doing that are not writing this newsletter are many and are calling to me from just outside the window. Kate is out there washing the beets we waded through mud to harvest, and I should help her. Or else I should change the oil on the tractor. I should at least nail down our budget for the rest of the year, to start to guess what might happen next season. Those all seem like more important things than sitting here writing about how hard it is to know what to do, but here I am, suddenly sure that this newsletter can’t be delayed any longer.
All season long I begged Anna to let go of things. Not entirely, just a little. The sheep, the garden, the dried flowers. We couldn’t afford the time, I said, and she said she didn’t want the farm without those things. She said it wouldn’t be whole. Still, she did let go: she didn’t breed the ewes this year because getting up in the middle of the night for lambing in May with a huge potato planting the next day was entirely too much. She scaled back in the garden and dried less flowers—enough for everyone to craft with, but not enough for the abundant bouquets she wanted you all to have. I’ll tell you: it hurt her to do this. She thrives in the details, in doing things well, and it was no small effort for her to stop, even a little. It even hurt to watch, though not enough for me to try to help her do it all. I didn’t have time! I had other more important things to do, like inefficiently process a field of dry beans that had been left out in one rain too many. Kate and Anna had to conspire to get me to let go of the final variety.
Who is to say which are the most important things? Some days I’m sure I know, and others I can be convinced of anything.
No matter what, letting go is a beast. It’s always easier to tell someone else what they should be letting go of. In practice, it’s rather ruthless. At best, it’s a leap into the unknown; at worst, it’s a profound and terrifying loss. What will happen on the other side, and what if we find out we let go of the thing that was most important to keep? What if lambs and Dragon’s Tongue dried beans were the things that made this farm whole?
But here we are. It’s no longer fall, no longer solstice, no longer even 2022. We let it go, whether we wanted to or not. It appears that it’s the only way to move forward. To stop trying to harvest the carrots; we can buy from David and Kayta’s store of Boleros and it will be okay. To look at a pile of broken hoops and know that it will not be fixed today, that we have to wait until the storms pass. To consider, wildly, a shift in the plan that might fit within our little human capacities.
The hope, of course, is that letting go of the carrots and my newsletter deadlines will ultimately mean letting go of a great deal more, all those tricky nebulous things like expectations and insecurities and the way it should be. That letting go is the only way to make room for anything new. That maybe we’ll learn it’s all okay, or maybe I’ll learn that I really should have left the house fifteen minutes ago and I really should have finished this newsletter by solstice instead of those last episodes of Finding Magic Mike. (But I had to see who won!)
