2022 -- SURPRISE! and Happy New Year!

Somehow, I find I have ventured into a new dimension--2022 arrived at midnight and caught me sleeping. Nothing has changed and everything has changed! Time changed. The fluid world I look upon outside my window is nothing like that I looked upon 40 years ago...that first year on this farm New Year's Day. Many of the same trees and grasses stare back at me, some of the same buildings stand placidly against the background of the mountain and enveloping clouds. But the air is different, and yes, it's warmer. Climate change is here. The taste is different...it's woodsy and earthly fragrant of toadstools and rotting humus, not so winter like - I cannot taste the snowflakes' breath on my face, smell the crispness of the icy winds entering my lungs. I long for that feel, that taste, that fluidity and crispness of winter. Sitting here, I sense and attempt to embrace this 2022 New Year, the new warmth, the shift in our land and farm that 2022 shuttles into being...Sitting here, 72, not 32, goals the same - but changed. Embracing being stewards of the few animals now in my care, choosing to give back to the land, what 100 years of farming has taken from it. Letting Nature and Mother Earth have the opportunity to reestablish native habitat, native grasses and forbs, and allow insects and frogs, salamanders and turtles, squirrels and birds, raccoons and possums and coyote and deer and bear to find their balance once again. That we too might find our Balance in this changing world--where nothing has changed and everything has changed!