Fall on the farm...

The morning air is juicy crisp and tangy tart like a Stayman apple. Autumn has come to the farm and preparations are underway for winter.
The old high barn, once leaning into the ground like a ship run aground, now stands upright with new beams and sills. Soon the old wood siding will be back in place and holes in the roof patched with old tin. It will be ready for winter this year after nearly sinking into the ground under the weight of our twenty inch snow last Christmas.
Old Ferdinand the Bull, now retired from bulling, is being moved to the horse pasture. His arthritis makes it difficult for him to go up and down the steep hills. He needs extra feeding now that his teeth are so worn down that he cannot graze enough grass to fill his belly. It will be easier for us to tend him when he is in our back yard. My dad would be amused by my inability to act as a proper farmer who would have sent Ferdinand to market years ago, but I couldn’t. That sweet old English shorthorn bull will die here and then Michael and Gary will have to dig the biggest grave of all in the cow cemetery.
Jay Roberts is helping me prepare my flower borders for winter and the big fall church picnic next weekend. Brightly painted mums are beautiful complements to the leaves just tinged with color around the farm. While we were cleaning out one of the beds, clipping back bloomed out seed pods that had been stripped by birds, I saw two bright yellow large spiders, riding spiders, I think, building their zipper webs in the yarrow and black eyed susan stalks. We left them for Aidan and his friend Isaac to see when they came Friday. When I took the boys out to see the two spiders...ooops! In the center of the web, one spider was on top of the other spider who was now dead and being encased as a to go meal along with a grasshopper. Stocking the pantry for the next crop of spiders was an unexpected lesson in the realities of living with Mother Nature.
Autumn... bittersweet memories of summer’s fullness and life’s unending cycles of birth and death... my favorite season of the year. Fall contains new beginnings as well as endings and my memory safety deposit box contains the smell of new crayons and the feel of clean notebooks, the crisp starchy crunch of new dresses for school being worn for the first time, the feelings of a do over, a chance to begin again and an opportunity to do better this year. After the loosey goosey summer, order returns and schedules provide a safety net for me, deadlines and expectations.
Miss Winnie, our eighty seven year old pianist has been ill and I have been accompanying worship on the piano. My skills are a little rusty. Keeping up with what is sung where keeps you on your toes. We sang the final “Amen” a capella Sunday because I was getting ready for the postlude and forgot the “Amen”. Oh, well. Pastor Pat likes to sing a capella once in awhile anyway.
Years spent sitting on the piano and organ benches of various Baptist and Presbyterian churches have left their mark on me and those body memories are flooding back as I struggle to get my fingers in shape. One of my gifts as an accompanist is the ability to play with feeling. I am finding God again not by singing but in interpreting what I hear and feel in the notes and words on the pages of our hymnals. I am grateful for the chance to reclaim this part of my soul work.
Like the spider, I am drawing into the center of my web, making preparation for the season to come, dark night and winter cold. It is time to pull together what I will need for this next season of the soul...deep breaths of autumn air that set my teeth on edge remind me to be grateful for my body, this life and my age... no longer young but full of both memory and possibility. Darkness drawing near with the promise of more light yet to come...
My friend Deryl Fleming wrote these words that are my Autumn Prayer... We do not any of us get what we deserve in life. We live not by just deserts but by sheer grace. And here and there, now and then, we know it. When we do, we who have been graced become gracious grateful creatures of the Giver. Which is why we are here, to render our lives as compositions of gratitude.
And so I shall this winter work to render my life a composition of gratitude. I will write in my new autumn composition book songs of thanksgiving and praise that will warm me in the depths of darkest coldest nights, a reminder of light and warmth yet to come. Thanks be to God for the seasons of the natural order and for the seasons of the soul. Amen.