Promise of Another Season by Eugene Wyatt

October 2004

Rituals change with the seasons and we change with them, we are our rituals. The first frosts of the year come now and kill the tender vegetation. So much of my farm year is spent keeping sheep, vegetables and myself alive, it's a relief to let the Yellow Crookneck Squash die, to let the day have its way, to be part of its ritual rather than have it be part of mine.

Sunday I cut the year's first firewood, my chainsaw spewing tan wood chips everywhere and releasing the fresh aroma of heartwood into the air. With a circular overhead swing of a heavy axe I split the logs, good sweat work, firewood warms you twice they say. The sweet smoke from the black cherry curled into the lapis sky mingling with the leaves turning from life green to dead orange, color antagonisms that won't last and must be appreciated for their moment. Soon will come a day when we will see the colors change from morning to afternoon, it comes that fast. Then overnight the leaves will be gone, knocked from the limbs by a hard rain, rustling as you step through them amid the nude trees which now disclose their hidden postures, their crooked umber trunks and naked branches.

Here on the farm Thanksgiving isn't just a day in November, it's a ritual that begins when the geese fly south, barking overhead. The Autumn harvest was good but will end early this year, all my Blue Solaise Leeks are sold, my Porcelain Garlic too, as are the Red Norland Potatoes, Green Zebra Tomatoes, Blonde Cucumbers and Burgundy Beans. I thank you all for a good year in bad weather and for the promise of another season on a small farm to plant the earth for you. Greenmarket deserves our thanks too, making it possible for me to grow food and fiber and for you to have it.

Color is my ritual now, hand dyeing yarn for Winter warmth with natural dyes in my cement gray basement, stirring a steaming 100 quart pot with a stainless steel ladle. This is alchemy, the work of witches, reds from madder root, yellows from the osage tree and indigo blues from fermented leaves combining them for secondary gradations, gratefully turning these vibrant concoctions on yarn into gold. Dyeing is a new venture for me, master dyer Michele Wipplinger of Earthues in Seattle is my kind mentor guiding me through the complexities of color mixing. I will have more to say about Earthues and the wonders of natural color as I dye forward.

And it is the season of presidential politics, hopefully a season of change. Monday I mixed too much dark madder with too few dead cochineal bugs and got an unexpected color, an arrogant orange, an angry orange, an illiterate orange, a debt orange, an oil orange, a Fox orange, a bomb flash orange of death and deceit, I call this orange Burning Bush.

Eugene Wyatt