My New Night Soundtrack (+ party details): CSA Week #15 – Sept. 18, 2019

As you may or may not know, our family moved residences this season. For a decade we lived at the farmhouse on Hwy J, at the Crossroads of Highway P and Highway J.

When we first moved there, I obsessed about all the traffic that occurs from 4:30 am until about 8:30 am, and then again during the afternoon traffic times. It was so loud, and it took me easily a year to get used to it. Or rather it took me a year to learn to tune it out. (We humans are highly adaptable afterall).

Despite my learned ability to love the beauty of our farm, one thing I couldn’t do was sleep with the windows open. Or at least if they were open in our bedroom, I needed to have a loud fan to drown out the early morning traffic.

Just one car at 3:45 a.m. out on a country highway can make a surprising amount of noise. And it turns out, one car is harder to tune out than the sounds of constant traffic.

Again, we are adapatble right?  So at our old house we could still feel the night air, but the tradeoff was a loud fan to block out the outside noise. This was the norm for us.  I was perferctly content with that situation. I could still feel the night air and the breezes.

But honestly, after a decade of sleeping with a loud fan during the summer months, I had forgotten all the sounds that happen at night!

This is, by far, my favorite part about living at our new land. There is so much sound at night!
And since our home is backed by the woods, there are lots of new sounds for me to learn.

Right now an Eastern Screech owl is calling. It sounds like a high-pitched horse neighing.  And in the farther distance are two Great Horned Owls calling back and forth, the male and the female together.

Some nights the coyotes go nuts and they call back and forth to each other across the valley. It’s a cacophany of sound.

And of course the everpresent symphony of the insects, provide a back drop of constant sound.

Even as some of the nights have chilled down, I won’t close the windows. I just keep hearing beautiful sounds and I want to keep hearing them until the cold takes over.

As always, the changing of the seasons teaches us to savor… both taste and sound.

Happy cooking, happy eating!
Farmer Cassie