On Winter and Gratitude
Caroline teaching PEAS students this fall at the PEAS Farm.
Caroline Stephens is the PEAS Farm Lecturer, which means she cultivates the connection between the University of Montana’s Environmental Studies program and Garden City Harvest and leads the college education and curriculum at the farm. I asked her if she would share some of her thoughts from the winter season. - Genevieve
One thing I love most about farming is the way my life mirrors the seasons. In spring, I bathe in green. My muscles grow as my body re-learns—slowly—the labor of sowing and planting. In summer, all day I squint, my skin turns dry, and my spirit burns and burns with the sun. Then the dark comes earlier, the geese come back, and I am in my home more, gathering, preserving, and preparing for the dark season.
Even in a pandemic, the year has plodded on in the same cycles of growth: Tucking seeds into peaty soil. Cabbages like basketballs. A greenhouse full of freshly harvested onions, the air ripe and acrid. Apples by the bushel.
Then winter comes. The work dries up. I am home, always. I rise in darkness and retire in darkness. In winter, I can finally rest.
But sometimes, I don’t.
Sometimes I am really bad at resting, at letting my metabolism, pulse, and heartbeat slow the way bears do in winter and birds do at night. Sometimes I can’t seem to let go of the summer rush.
The trouble is, in winter, there’s less light. There’s less energy. Still spinning from the growing season, I hit the ground running on Monday and crash by Tuesday, and then fall into the dreaded winter blues, my heart the color of gloaming snow. Purple, tired, and melancholy.
Again in this year of the global pandemic, of extraordinary loss and grief but also truth and hope, I am trying to rest. To give up on productivity as measurement of goodness. To learn to just be. And just being is for me, at times, quite hard. Our dominant American culture teaches us to do otherwise, so I am unlearning and relearning how to be still in the dark.
One winter years ago, when I was still a farm hand, a friend asked me about the kind of farm I hoped to run someday. What values would you like to farm with, she asked?
Last day on the farm for the PEAS farm summer crew.
Values? I hadn’t really given that much thought, so much as the garlic, the orchard, the herbs I’d put in the ground. Well, I said, perhaps gratitude. I had worked at farms that felt overwhelming, tiresome, like there was never enough land, money, labor. And I had also worked at farms that could have benefitted from more of those things, but also felt abundant, as farms so often do during the growing season, when the soil brings forth both crops and weeds that you can eat, that you can use as medicine, that evoke a feeling of love.
In this dark season time, on this warm winter day where the snow is soft and the sun turns the hills velveteen brown, I am idling. What grounds me here in this slow moment is a feeling of gratitude. Even in a hard year that has tested my strength and forced growth, that has isolated me from my family back in Kentucky, that has caused great suffering among colleagues, family members, students, friends, I am thinking of gratitude for what is here, now.
This winter, as I allow my body to live on the earth’s clock, I’ll start by settling into that feeling of gratitude, blowing on that little flame of hope in the darkness, like faint coals in a cold stove.
Here’s my gratitude list for 2020. What’s yours?
For our PEAS crew: Dave, Peter, Miriam, Jason, Ethan and our UM crew leaders, Dylan, Lars, and Sarah. For bringing the hustle and hilarity, and especially to Jason for instigating fun and lightness—farm lunches, movie nights, pizza parties etc.
For Dave, for rewriting the field plan—twice—getting the cultivating tractor in high use, figuring out how to get through the year production-wise with a much smaller crew, for adapting in so many smart ways, and for the conversations, compassion, and compromises.
For our spring and summer PEAS students, for being willing to adapt and change and being such a small but mighty crew in a hard season.
For our fall PEAS students, for showing up and bringing so much spirit and lightness, for laughing and joking, for their engagement with the place and one another.
To the land, for its continual nourishment, for sunshine, for new growth, for old trees, for fruit, for Rattlesnake Creek, for the fox and the short-eared owl on the hill.
For Jean and her leadership through an unprecedented and challenging year.
For Marit's humble leadership with efforts in building a more equitable and just organization.
For CSA members new and old who smiled through their mask every Monday at pickup.
For my wife, who has been my sole close contact for nearly 40 weeks, and who still listens to me after all that time.
Caroline Stephens was raised in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. She got her introduction to farming back in Kentucky, and then moved west to pursue her master's degree in Environmental Studies, where her research addressed the history of drought management on grain farms in central Montana. After graduate school, she managed production at Foothill Farm in St. Ignatius, Montana, and then moved to the Moon-Randolph Homestead, where she and her partner serve as caretakers at a working, public homestead. Off the farm, she loves spending time in wild landscapes and learning a new square dance or two to call at local dances.