Dear Readers,
How I’ve missed you. Last I posted, I wrote about how we can do hard things. Since then, well, I’ve mostly been doing those hard things. Under my breath, every day, “I can do hard things…I can do hard things…I can do hard things.” And guys? It’s getting easier. (My mother-in-law bought me a print, just to remind me; I hung it on the wall in my bedroom. (It’s an Etsy thing; you can find the print here if you like.) It’s one of the first things I see when I wake up and one of the last things I see before I go to bed. And I think it helps.)
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Have you ever been at a spot in your life where you can literally feel things transition around you? The winds shift, and things change, and you have to learn to adapt or you get left behind.
In the past few weeks on the ranch, I’ve felt the shift as seasons transition from summer to autumn. A few leaves have already fallen, but most are holding tight, ablaze in a sea of colors that remind us how beautiful transitions can be. Temperatures are dropping at night, and high and low temps easily vary by more than 20 degrees over the course of the day. The shift in seasons, slow at first then all at once, seems an apt metaphor for my life right now. Jeremiah’s business keeps him on the road almost constantly these days as he shoes horses and attends conventions and clinics, sometimes student, sometimes speaker. He’s gone more than he’s here at the moment, and I’m convinced that isn’t going to change.
Our relationship dynamic is shifting like the seasons, adapting to our new reality.
My relationship with with the farm is changing too. I’m learning to take care of things, not just the day-in and day-out, but all of it. This almost farmgirl is taking farmgirl lessons all over again with a long list of things to learn. Mostly it has to do with equipment, the only area of the farm that was completely Jeremiah’s domain up until this point. In my husband’s absence, my dad, a former farmboy himself, is teaching me. A few weeks ago, he taught me to use our zero turn mower, a necessity as every stitch of grass on the property was overgrown. Continue reading “Autumn –Or– We can still do hard things.”
