After three seasons of rain and damp, I have been gifted exactly what I requested: a drying landscape. With little rain over the past six weeks and little in the forecast, the pastures that were grazed hard and late are already brown; fortunately, though, those grazed earlier in the year are still relatively green. And a trip down our gravel driveway yields a small dust bowl in the truck’s wake.

September and October are historically our driest months, so I am not unduly worried. Fall also brings cooler temperatures, and I enjoyed the 37 degrees I awoke to at 5 this morning. And I appreciate the opportunity to start my work earlier in the day. Many of my farm tasks can only begin when the dew has dried. During the summer that means work starts when the heat is at its most intense, but the past few weeks have found me out on the tractor bush hogging or even weed-eating as early as 9. This drier weather allows me to be more productive, leaving the farm looking more, well, neatly barbered. I’m happy for the dry now, though if you ask me again in another eight weeks and the rains haven’t come at least a few times, I may be singing a different tune.

Along with the lack of precipitation has come the seasonal arrival of massive combines on our two-lane backroads, slowing traffic throughout the area as they move from field to field. Farms in East Tennessee are not set out in neat Midwest grids. Even the largest fields may be only fifty to a hundred acres, often set in sprawling irregular shapes. A farmer with several fields of such size to harvest, and perhaps scattered across several small valleys, negotiates narrow twisting county highways driving a machine designed to reap, thresh, gather, and winnow grain on the Great Plains. From plot to plot, the farmer and his entourage traverse these blacktops like a Main Street parade on July 4^th composed of only combines, dump trucks, and an accompanying fleet of pickups. We don’t farm the big commodity crops of corn, soybeans, and wheat. Nonetheless, I like to see such industrious rural action. And truly, I don’t mind anything that slows me down in this life … much.

During these past weeks that straddled summer and now have crossed over into early fall, the tulip poplar leaves began to flutter off the trees, marking a falling rain of foliage that continues until early November, when the arrival and passing of a single windy cold front leaves the forests naked to the coming winter.

Farming routines are marked by these seasonal and annual changes—much like the recent departure of the Kid, who has been replaced by a new Kid. Our much-appreciated helper of three years, Aiden, eventually matured into a well-rounded older teenager with too many extracurricular hobbies and sport interests (coupled with working on his own parents’ farm) to be here enough to help. So now the thirteen-year-old nephew of our neighbors over the hill has taken up the mantle of following direction and reading the mind of your crusty scribe. The new Kid made me smile when I caught him singing the South Park work song Master’s Got Me Working as he dissembled an electric fence yesterday.

Out on our lower fields the rams have been enjoying a conjugal visit with their respective flocks of ewes. A handsome Tunis boy leased from a neighbor will be returned later today. Both flocks will then be merged, leaving the Texel as the clean-up ram, which means that he will be tasked with breeding any ewes not already bred by the Tunis, in addition to those in his own flock. Lambs to follow in winter and early spring.

And finally, behind the equipment shed in the farrowing yard, Ginger, our Red Wattle sow who was given the butcher’s reprieve, has spent the past fertility cycle with a young inexperienced boar. We hope (though we half expect another failure) that she was bred, never having witnessed the act firsthand. Perhaps the young boar got the job done, but without being too graphic for your Sunday sensibilities, we saw him mount and finish his job from every damned approach but the right one. Poor girl, poor boy. He was leased from another neighbor and returned home earlier this morning. The upshot is that if Ginger comes back in heat a few weeks from now, we will have another difficult decision to make. If not, then look to hear about our new piglets in three months, three weeks, and three days.

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Reading this weekend: Judgment Prey, the latest John Sandford mystery, and Book Madness, A Story of Book Collectors in America (D. Gigante), a dense, well-written glimpse into the early years of collecting in this country.

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