The Weight of Harvest

The earth holds its breath before the frost. We spend the summer gathering, filling the cellar, stacking the wood. It is a quiet labor, this preparation for the long sleep. There is a particular gravity to the harvest—a sense that everything must be accounted for before the light retreats. We teach the young to reach into the dirt, to pull what is hidden into the open. They do not yet know the necessity of the cold, or why we store the sun in jars and roots. They only know the shape of the thing they hold, the weight of it in small hands. We watch them, remembering when we too believed that the season would never end, that the fields would always offer up their bounty without asking for anything in return. The wind shifts. The air thins. What remains when the fields are finally bare?

Kari Cvar has captured this fleeting stillness in her image titled Pumpkin Patch. It is a reminder of how we carry the warmth of the harvest into the coming dark. Does the earth remember the hands that touched it?