Field Notes: Fall Equinox 2026

As the seasons shift from field work to kitchen work, I spend a lot more time listening to music and podcasts. Recently, I listened to an episode of On Being called Hope is a Muscle, by Krista Tippett with guest Joy Harjo. In the conversation, centered around hope in this modern world, Joy Harjo talks "about Einstein’s sense of time, ... that what Einstein really did with high physics is restore time to the heart of nature, where it had always been, in traditional cultures, in human cultures, and that is time as seasonal, cyclical, generational." This struck a chord and I've been thinking about it ever since. Our society puts a lot of pressure on linear time, asking questions like, “Where will you be in five, ten, fifteen years?” It can be difficult to remember a more natural version of time, but I find there is something hopeful in doing so.

Seasonal

We've returned to fall, with the passing of the Fall Equinox. I recently read a post online that suggested that the season of fall is like turning off the overhead lights of summer and instead, lighting a candle. I feel it, my body recognizes this shift of seasons and relaxes, my jaw loosens, the work feels slower in a good way and I am at ease. I remember, with nostalgia, the way I feel in fall and I return to the rituals that make this season so cozy, like cooking a big pot of soup, enjoying homemade sourdough bread, reading by the light of a lamp, and snuggling under a cozy blanket with my kiddos. There is a season, turn turn turn. 

Cyclical

Remembering the cycles of the seasons and returning to each one in sequence allows me to endure the hottest, harshest of days, with hopefulness that this too shall pass and something familiar will soon take it's place.

This season has been challenging in new ways I couldn't have expected. After nearly ten years of living at our current homestead, we have "figured out" ways to make things operate smoothly, despite seasonal challenges like late frosts, dry spells, insect pressure, etc. But this is the first time I have really felt the pressures of an increasingly extreme climate paired with an economy that's stretched thin with high gas and food costs and so much uncertainty.

From dry spells in the early season to three weeks of almost non-stop rain, it has been difficult for us to manage our crops in the field. We didn't grow onions this year for the first time in a decade, because the past two seasons they have rotted in the field from weeks of rains and no where for it to go. We didn't grow pumpkins this season either, and have had a difficult time sourcing and storing them from other growers, the constant field moisture causing them to rot on the vines and even after harvest. There is a romance to farming that is easy to share—the beautiful harvests and the abundance—but this is part of it too.

I wonder what life will look like in the seasons and cycles that lie ahead. How can we carry the beauty of each season through the challenges that present themselves, and what can we learn from the cycles we've already lived through?

Generational

It was not my intention to work in a way that captures each of my grandparents interests with such parallels. It feels like such a gift to carry a piece of each of my grandparents in my daily life and I often think of them throughout the seasons. Both of my Grandmas loved to garden and tended beautiful flowers, and like me, my Mema loved to cook and sew. My Grandpa was a farmer and my Poppa made caramel in the winter time, like I do now too.

I am certain that all of their interests led me here, and that their love shines through the monotony of tasks—the planting, harvesting, preserving, cooking, tending and beginning again—I feel their presence. My Poppa taught me his caramel recipe in 2009 when I visited for Thanksgiving, a tradition he had for many years prior, and I have been making them ever since. My maternal grandparents raised their family on a farm and now, every spring I harvest roses from plants that are originally from their farm. I think of the tomatoes, pears, apples, raspberries, asparagus, butternut squash and sweet corn they grew and shared in great abundance - and can recall late nights with my mom elbow deep in cleaning produce to put up for winter, and I cherish the times I get to share these things with my kids knowing that my ancestors brought me to this moment.

My Poppa passed away last week, the last of my living grandparents, and I felt momentarily untethered as this generation of my family passes on. And yet, maybe this is what it means to live in the kind of time Joy Harjo was describing. We are never really starting over. We carry the seasons that came before us, carried by the hands that taught us, the recipes that were passed down, the seeds that were saved, the gardens that were tended. We carry them forward, often without realizing it, until one day we look around and recognize that we are living inside pieces of the lives that came before us.

In this, I find great hope. In the great wheel of the year, time will continue in a cyclical, seasonal way. We will move through abundance and scarcity, grief and joy, beginnings and endings. We will plant what we can, tend what we are given, and when the time comes, we will pass something along. Nothing stays the same, but nothing is ever entirely lost, either.