Like a Dog in The Fall Sunshine: Fall Week #1 – 10/29/25

 
Chilly temps and indoor work start our mornings now. Office work for me and Michael. Our skeleton staff washing and bagging vegetables in the shed.

We wait for the day to warm up. That can literally mean waiting for frost tolerant crops like kale and Brussels and mustard greens to unthaw so that they can be handled without damaging them. We put disposal hospital gloves underneath our work gloves to ward off the coldness of damp and dewey plants and blue rubber bands that snap hard on our fingers.

If we are lucky, the sun is out and by late morning it’s absolutely gorgeous outside. Maybe the coat has been taken off. And in warm hats, sweatshirts, and sunglasses we work outside in the sun and breeze.

Visually it is just stunning outside right now. Our fields are situated in Driftless valleys, so around us rise low hills of Autumn color. And closer by, wetland and prairie grasses are going tawny. The fields no longer have the massive color palette of summer, but the green of clover and winter rye is vivid against the browns and black of crops and weeds that could not tolerate last week’s hard frost. Meanwhile, the light has this dusty, low kind of feel. Softer. Very different from the blazing summer sun that bears down on us in the fields during the high season.

I could have bottled up yesterday, to feel in the deep cold of winter, the muddy stressful rise of spring, or the hot hot heat of summer – I would have. The feel of the air and the sun on my face had an indescribable feel (I’ll try though). The breeze feels different when it only hits my face and hands. Everything else is under clothing. Somehow this restricted sensation makes the breeze all the more lovely. Combine that with the welcome warmth of sun on my cheeks, and well…. divine.  A breeze that doesn’t make me cold, with a little sunshine warms me up just right… makes me feel like I’ve hit the Goldilocks jackpot.

The only thing that could have made this experience better is if I could have laid down next to Pepper and napped right along side him. Look at him!  His belly is actually stretched out facing the sun and the breeze – no doubt going for that same feeling I love on my cheeks on his only belly.

I am a realist however. I was working as Pepper lounged in the sun. But as I was harvesting bunches of arugula, I kept thinking that I was about as close as I could get at work to a dog in the fall sunshine.

Here’s hoping you get a few moments to feel like a dog in the fall sunshine – before the colder weather arrives.

Sincerely, 
Farmer Cassie