The seasonal transition of diminishing daylight / encroaching darkness accompanies the movement of market lambs off the place and gives me a measure of comfort.
Morning and evening pasture checks are quiet now without the near constant calling between ewes and lambs as they travel about grazing. Only 15 replacement ewe lambs stayed here this year. The winter feed situation is not going to support more. I culled 45 ewes plus we had an unusual number of unexplained ewe deaths this summer which means the flock has shrunk in size, albeit not the way we intended it too by any stretch. A few more ewes will leave via private sale.
We have just come through an early winter storm that dropped several inches of wet snow. Usually untroubled by off weather the ewes took to shelter in the bush in the early evening and remained there throughout most of the next day before venturing out to dig for greens in the heavy, wet snow. Cold weather in the days that followed allowed for a slow melt and seepage of moisture into the soil. While the crop farmers in the area are ripe with stress over the situation, this is wonderful for the pastures as we head into the dormant season.
There have been a number of challenges this Summer and Fall beginning with guardian dogs and concluding with very poor market prices that will make the upcoming year a tight one. So I’m okay with the shortening daylight because even though we are not at the end of the linear calendar year the transition to fall seems to offer a sense of closure on a tough year with weather and flock. It is what it is and once again we shall adjust and find our way to go with the flow of life and livelihood.
When I sat down to write this post I randomly clicked on an older journal entry, the start of a blog post created on March 19 – near last winters end. These are the first few words of that entry.
“The daylight length is growing and with it the pace of work is shifting. Mornings are becoming shorter and with the earlier sunrise I find myself feeling slightly panicked at the thought of keeping up with artwork without a solid block of time first thing in the morning.”
I did commit to diving deeper into artwork and that commitment stayed on track. It has been a successful try of making a lot of artwork, and, taking first steps toward putting the artwork out into the world. As a result my current spare time is full with commission requests for the Christmas season. I still struggle to keep up to posting to online spaces because computers feel like the furthest thing from the nature out here I love. I still treat being at the computer as a low priority activity even though online spaces are increasingly necessary for continued sharing. I’m sure Mother Nature’s advice for this dilemma would be summed up with one word: balance. Lucky for me I live among this prairie land where balance is found in spades.
