Almanack Contributor Adam Wilson

The human labors here at the Farm consist largely of moving Sheep and Cows from one paddock to another.  Before domestication and fences, this work—keeping the herds of hungry ruminants bunched together and always on the move—was the responsibility of those with gleaming incisors.  The top predators.  And the ground was the beneficiary.  Think Bison herds thousands strong thundering across the Prairie, building legendary meters-deep topsoil.  The herd acts like a paintbrush in the hands of a master landscape painter.  In simplified terms, they use their remarkably-adapted mouths, tongues and digestive systems to transform the standing Grasses into urine and manure, with which they paint the ground.  You could say that their job is to feed the ground back to itself.  They beget a greening of riotous fecundity.  Tragically, after just a few hundred years under the lash of the plow hitched to an economy of extraction, the remarkable capacity of those Prairie soils to sustain life has largely been reduced to rumor, to legend.

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Save a few ruddy Oaks, tenacious green Buckthorn and coppery Beech leaves, the hedgerows and woods are mostly bare now.  Old Maples along the farm drive have laid down their prolific Summer work—in places nearly knee-deep.  Weeks of warm Sun keep the Geese around, and their long residency has the unfortunate effect of normalizing that which was once novel.  But the place will seem deathly quiet when they leave, so I try to remind myself: you’d best listen while you can.  Cricket song no longer pulses in the meadow where I step from the house each morning to admire the place aloud—in greeting—before beginning to push and pull.  The project list, like the Maple leaves in the yard, seems suddenly knee-deep.  I keep wondering who is going to rake all those leaves this year.  It is a season to be undone by the going and the gone-ness of things, of those whose presence among us we had grown accustomed to.

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