While we’ve felt chilly recently, this winter has been a real pushover. But even though we haven’t been brutally tested like last year, looking back over pictures of summer fields still manages to bring a pang.
I miss summer, but I’m not aching for warmth like I was last year. It is a nice feeling to be at peace with winter rather than feeling like each day is a fight against it.
2 thoughts on “The Good Winter”
I find the weather elicits various emotions from me too now that I have animals in various degrees of housing and all the other outdoor activities farming entails. 20 degrees with calm is so much easier than -20 with wind.
Having the animals and knowing that, especially in the winter, their well-being depends on my ability to tend to them no matter what the conditions, this is tougher than I would have anticipated before I farmed. The struggle isn’t quite as visceral as a personal life-and-death struggle for survival, but the emotional and psychological conditions of farming in winter do bring us close to that intensity at times. When the grass starts its growth spurt in the second week of May, then we’re all optimists again.