We’ve reached maximum fecundity at the farmers’ market.

For a few weeks in September, there’s this magical moment of overlap where you can get strawberries and apples, peaches and pumpkins, asparagus and corn, plus meat and eggs and fish and cheese and flowers. Nearly everything that the market has to offer is on offer. A few weeks ago, the winter squash wasn’t ready yet and another week and the early berries will be gone. But for now it’s all there, local and perfectly ripe, picked yesterday or that morning, and almost always the best you’ve ever eaten.

I feel similarly, both looking back and looking forward, and using both to generate all kinds of ideas and plans.

But there’s a burden to this much fertility.

Last week I came home from the market with a huge amount of produce, all of which had to be prepped and either eaten / baked with or preserved for later. So plums and blueberries got made into low-carb treats and desserts. And cabbage, peppers, and beans were set to fermenting. Not to mention all the produce that became dinner salads, soup, and sides. And we haven’t even gotten to the hard squash yet. The week before, it was enough tomatoes to become homemade sauce and extra peaches to turn into peach butter — not to mention the fire cider, which will be ready at the start of October. This week will be the same, except that we’ll also be celebrating the equinox.

I feel the same way about my personal harvest. So much that I’ve done and learned this summer has to be picked through and processed so that I can be nourished into the winter months.

It would be kind of a lame metaphor… except it’s not a metaphor.

The older I get the more I realize that we are fundamentally animals that come from the earth and who are intimately connected to it. You can pretend it’s not so.  You can live in the city, keep the same work schedule year around, and generally feel like a modern urbane citizen. But then the seasonal clock ticks over and you find yourself with an armload of pumpkin and acorn and butternut. It’s like a switch deep in your brain that has one eye on the weather and the other on the larder and a frantic sense of needing to get things done, quickly now, before winter arrives.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be doing project reviews and resets, looking at how successful I was reaching my goals. I’ll be considering what to keep, what to ditch, and what experiments to try. I’ll be thinking about what I want to accomplish by the end of the year and how that will set me up for next year’s goals. I’ll do this as surely as I’ll buy winter squash (even though we don’t actually eat that much squash).

The past two weeks I’ve been on a break from the corporate world. In part for a well-needed rest, but also to give myself time to focus on my other projects, including Circle Thrice. I would say that the time has been moderately successful, but has also been mentally and emotionally taxing. There’s been a lot to harvest and preserve and still yet a lot to do. Because winter’s coming and I’m not ready yet.