The Where’s My Micro-Season: Week #15 – 9/15/21

The Where’s My? Micro-Season

While sharing dinner with a friend recently, I was talking about how everything is yellow right now. How I think of back to school time, that late August early September transition time as the yellow time. Goldenrod and wild sunflowers bloom, black walnuts start to turn, the conventional soy fields start to yellow as well. Even school buses are yellow.

She introduced the idea of micro-seasons to me, and I’m infatuated. As someone who works outside, she posited that I have lots of different ways to describe seasons. Similar to how the Inuit have all different kinds of words for snow and ice, people who work outside experience all kinds of seasons beyond the four main ones.

Take March – I think of that as mud season. But not the whole month, because the beginning of March is usually still snowy. That early part is when the horned larks start to fly back. So it’s lark season, followed by mud season.

The idea of a micro season has got me thinking about what the current micro season on the farm.  And while it’s still the yellow time, we are sliding into what I call the “Where’s My?” season.

Where’s My? season happens when the mornings start to get cold. Now, this is not to be confused with Where’s My Water Bottle season, which is very long-lasting, from about May until October. But Where’s My? season begins when we start to show up to work with layers on.

This morning many of us showed up with stocking caps over our baseball caps. There were vests and flannels and sweatshirts. And because of the dew, we wear rain pants over our work pants just about every morning now.

As the day warms up and our bodies begin to move, we inevitably start to strip down.

By lunch, most of us are down to regular work pants and tee shirts. And our hats? Who knows.  Around lunch time you hear lots of “Anybody seen my…?”  or “Crap, I have no idea where I left my…. ”  Harvest carts get full of random hats and sweatshirts – recently I picked up a stranded long sleeve in the beans.

So yeah, welcome to the lovely, cozy, chilly mornings of Where’s My? season – where summer is still so much in our bloods that we need lots of layers in the morning, but it’s not so cold that we need to pay close attention to where those layers end up once stripped off, because we know the warmth of the day will carry us.

Cheers,
Farmer Cassie