open

The long open fall makes it easy to get the farm work done but it is also seductive.  Who would not rather go for long walks under Cottonwood and Ash and Box Elder scuffing his feet through the piles of fallen leaves, listening to the south wind chuckling contentedly in the increasingly bare branches and then out onto the dormant pastures, mature grasses crunching underfoot while the breeze stirs the seedheads?  Geese fly over in the vain search this year for open water and a rooster pheasant explodes into flight from nearly under your feet, rusty scream trailing behind him like a piece of broken machinery.  You could stay here awhile!

Then the thoughts intrude.  There are pigs still on an unheated drinker.  Plus the unfound short in another drinker heater.  The sow shelters have not been closed up for winter.  All the windbreak stalk bales are not in place.  Hog weaning and then breeding is coming shortly.  The bull needs to go to the fall calving herd and the market animals need sorting from the cow herd here so that the cows can be made to scrape the crop fields for provisions.

Work is always there, but all humans, including farmers, need dreamtime.  A balance must be found.