Falling Fast and Fleeting: Autumn at Red Gate Farm
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Vic Gravel-RGF Staff
Days creep cooler, nights threaten that icy dew every farmer dreads. Somehow it is already mid October and leaves from vibrant orange mute, blanketing the garden and pastures in sun dappled showers. These past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about the impermanence of things-autumn school groups have come and gone. Fall is the long breath exhaling gently into the slumber of winter, everything lulling toward rest. This mid October I am thinking about the passing of time, how sweetly we savor it all when we recall that time is limited, and how life on the farm lends itself to all this reflecting. Let’s talk about it.
In early September I reflected on the energy buzzing about the farm in anticipation of our first school group of the season. In so many ways kids are the vivifying force of this space. “The wind is blowing,” I wrote, “the asters and goldenrod frame the scene-the rams are grazing on fresh, lucious pasture grass. Moths and butterflies are flitting by, swallows and meadowlarks swooping side by side. The garden is lush, technicolor and bursting with life. The trees have lots to say today, anticipating the buzz of tiny humans back on the farm. Clovers quiver, aspens quake, Red Gate farm vibrates in wait for all the kiddoes to return.”
In September those kiddoes arrived, vans and buses packed to the brim with stuffed duffels and giggling tweens. We welcomed Brooklyn Heights Montessori School and Mary Walsh Elementary School followed by Wellan Montessori School just last week. Together kids and staff co-created spaces of compassion, kindness, hard work, and resilience utterly bursting with so, so much laughter, music, and smiles to melt your heart. We hauled wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow of weeds from the garden to the compost, several tenacious students earning their spot on our renowned “Epic Wheelbarrow Journey of Epicness” leaderboard. We walked oxen and cracked bulbs and bulbs of garlic, enjoyed delectable meals featuring garden produce whipped up by farm cook Theo, listened to stories by firelight, and surveyed our towering sugar maples.
I had the honor and pleasure of leading my first work block during Wellan’s visit, a time when kids and staff collaborate to complete various farm work tasks. It was pure magic-we caked our hands in soil harvesting carrots, beets, tomatoes, and scallions, the perfect chance to teach the kids a few of my favorite words: Amaranthaceae, Apiaceae, Amaryllidaceae, and Solanaceae. I’m a sucker for -aceaes. We chatted about beet thinning and debated the merits of tomatoes as fruits, eventually moving to garlic bulb cracking-a time to sit and gather, sharing stories and laughter and tenderness. These are the moments most precious to me-being together with the kids in moments of vulnerability uniquely brought out by our collective work and play and humility in this place. This is the magic of Red Gate Farm.
Now it is October and our fall season is quickly coming to a close. We are weeding the garden and turning beds, prepping to plant garlic, nestling our animals into their winter enclosures, preparing for our annual Halloween shindig, and trying to get our last bits in before the frost arrives. All the while I have been acutely aware of just how quickly these weeks, our time with the kids, and this season are passing. While collecting hordes of massive dahlias and the last of the season’s marigolds, snapdragons, and zinnias with the kids, I had a moment of clarity about the gift of the impermanence of things.
Part of what is both so challenging and so profoundly meaningful about this work is that we as educators only spend three(ish) full days with visiting student groups. You are attempting to create an experience for each child that will enrich their life far beyond the bounds of the farm, instilling values and experiences that shape them as a growing individual in vital ways. All of this is to be done in three days, -relationships cultivated, bonds formed, memories made- and yet, by another stroke of Red Gate magic, it happens. Kids leave changed, educators are moved and made better by every child that comes through this farm. We are constantly learning from one another, kids and adults, humans and animals and plants (though I suspect we are learning a lot more from the animals and plants than they are from us). I firmly believe it is the brevity of the school group visits that hones our intentionality as educators, that allows us to embody in a focused way the values and behavior and emergent moments so important to us. Passion and intention are infectious, and school groups give us the chance to lean into both of those things. Everything is impermanent, and so we make it all mean something.
I watch as marigolds melt to brown, withered goop, as oaks and maples shed themselves bare, I watch as kids arrive at ten a.m. on a Monday and leave by noon on a Wednesday, as raspberries ripen and fall from the cane. I watch as the world never stops, only inhales and exhales, made all the sweeter by the impermanence of things. How short this fall season was, how short and how utterly magical. Here on the farm and as an educator I find myself so much less inclined to wish autumn just a little longer; I can sit with the bittersweetness, savor the moments as they pass. With this budding ability to let the fact of impermanence and ephemerality simply be, I leave you. This too cannot last forever.
