Harvest wonderland
Saying goodbye to the birds and rereading Murakami - it's a very autumnal vibe
Hi friend,
Harvest has arrived. There’s urgency in the air, hovering over fields and farms as the temperature drops and the sunlight shortens. We had a scorching summer, with almost no rain; now it’s autumn, and everyone is convinced that the Old Farmer’s Almanac is correct in predicting a colder-than-average winter. I’ve been told you can blame God or Gaia or maybe Biden for the strange weather — not the fossil fuels burning endlessly as farmers bring in the harvest.
I’ve been told many things I disagree with here, but I tend to believe that this winter will be harsh.
I’ve spent the past two evenings on my balcony, sipping an absurdly perfect Grgich Hills petite sirah and watching my neighbor’s chickens peck across my backyard. Leaves are starting to yellow. The petunias have gone leggy and the grass is almost done for the year. Even the sky is changing — the deep, brilliant blue of summer is leaching away, fading to an almost-icy color that will, by November, be mostly grey. I’m sure someone could tell me why the color is changing — the sun’s angles? reflections off bare dirt instead of growing crops? — but the blue is disappearing with the birds, carried south to spend the winter in more welcoming climes.
The background noise of life is also receding. The birds who remain call to each other across my yard; but the insects’ volume, which was turned all the way up to eleven in August, is back to a reasonable five and dropping fast. The chainsaw buzz of locusts is done for the year. The wasps have mostly disappeared. Young queens hide in my soffits, dreaming of building next year’s nests.
In the fields, the corn and soybeans have turned to gold. The corn stalks are dry now, and they rustle in the wind — an endless murmur, almost like the sea. I think there’s a reason why my body accepted coastal California and did not accept Colorado. It is soothed by whispering waves of grain or water, not eerie forests and wind whipping around mountain tops.
Where the locusts once dominated my balcony evenings, now I hear machinery — the distant hum of combines, miles away, harvesting corn and soybeans. Semis rumble by my house, seemingly at all hours, hauling wagons full of grain. On good-weather days, farmers won’t stop until they’re too tired to keep going; they might harvest until four in the morning if rain is coming the next day. Modern farm equipment, with headlights and climate-controlled cabs, can run forever — and with new combines now priced at $500,000-$1,000,000, you have to run them forever to pay them off.
Everyone here is saying to each other, “I don’t know how anyone does it” — “it” being “live reasonably comfortably.” Everyone is watching, nervous, as interest rates tick up and food prices keep increasing…and yet, somehow, corn and soybean commodity prices (what a farmer is paid per bushel) are the lowest they’ve been in years. They’d say to blame God or Gaia or maybe Biden for that, too. The real culprits are too hard to pin down.
Still, there’s an anticipatory buzz to the season. Soup suppers and community dinners are almost at hand. Clubs that went dormant in summer are meeting again. Everyone will be less busy soon; the social calendar will pick up the slack.
Or at least…that’s what should happen. We’ve lost some rhythms in the last forty years, as people were pushed off farms and into town jobs, with shifts and schedules that don’t bend to the seasons. It used to be, farming families could always make time to help out a neighbor in need or attend a daytime club meeting. That’s harder with a town job’s lack of flexibility.
More than anything else, the people I talk to here attribute their declining numbers of volunteers (which is still wildly high per capita!) to the number of younger people who have desk jobs and can’t do anything voluntary during the day. Maybe remote work could change that — but maybe that’s why we’re seeing so many corporations pulling people into offices. Less time for a community -> shallower communities -> less personal support -> more reasons to fear losing or giving up a job -> less time spent socializing, more time spent grinding. Repeat ad infinitum.
Or maybe I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist, albeit on the other side of the conspiracy spectrum from most of my neighbors.
In my old corporate jobs, this often felt like the worst time of the year — annual planning and annual performance reviews all happening at once, a mad sprint to the commercial pressures of end-of-year reporting and holiday sales. I never felt like I had time for anything other than that grind; I went home every night, exhausted by a natural corporate cycle that is, upon reflection, not at all natural.
Sitting in Iowa today, I can feel, somewhere in my bones — maybe like a crazy almanac-reading fortune-teller — that autumn is meant to be honored. I feel it with the changing sky and the dropping temperatures. I feel it as the animals gather their last supplies. It’s almost time to clean up and hunker down. It’s almost time to rest, to say goodbye to the birds and insects, and to sit by the fire until they come back.
But autumn is a liminal space — change is guaranteed, but winter isn’t here yet. Until it is, I’ll seize every day I can get on my balcony, writing a book that suddenly feels like it can only take place in autumn — like it can only take place in a season when it feels conceivable that two different worlds can both exist.1
A book recommendation
I won’t always update you on my goal to read fifty books this year. But this week, I reread Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
I first read Murakami in college, and this is one I’ve returned to several times. It’s split into alternating perspectives: in one, the protagonist is an unnamed man working as something of a data analyst, although it’s clear early on that his data processing work is dangerous and relies on a change made to his brain by a shadowy entity known as the System. In the other perspective, the protagonist is an unnamed man living in an unnamed Town, surrounded by a Wall and guarded by a Gatekeeper, who is forcibly stripped of his shadow and tasked with reading others’ dreams from the skulls of unicorns.
It’s a weird book. I still love it. Murakami has a bizarre sense of humor and a unique melancholy with most of his books, which I embraced with maudlin fervor at twenty and still love, differently, at forty-two. And it obviously ties into some core piece of my own story, which is split between two worlds (Iowa and San Francisco) and is coming out in my current manuscript as a strange blend of fantasy and sci-fi.
Side note: I also discovered that a dessert I once had and loved in Bali, which was whimsically named “Whisky, torture, Turgenev,” must have been named for a chapter by the same name in this book. It was such a coincidence, and one I didn’t catch when I had the dessert in 2017, that I could almost be convinced that my brain, too, has been split in half by a scientist living under a waterfall in the sewers of Tokyo.
You can find Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Google Play, Apple, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.
Have a lovely week!
Sara
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With the terrorist attacks in Israel, the war in Ukraine, the state of American politics, and a million other data points, it’s probably naive to think in terms of worlds meeting and coexisting - but change is almost always possible. It would just be nice to get some good changes instead of bad changes sometime soon.
This was beautifully lyrical. Thank you!
I had to look up leggy petunia to see what sort of condition that was. :)