Night In This World – A Journey, Part 2
Near the Fall Equinox I began to write this piece about harvest season, intending to publish on that day. For various reasons—from the high-intensity whirl of the school semester starting, to an unsettled feeling I had about the topic—I set the essay aside. Just for a few days, I thought.
Harvest. In Old English, haerfest was the name of the season between August and November. The word’s roots contain the ideas of ‘plucking, gathering, cropping.’ In the 16th century, a curious narrowing of the meaning of ‘harvest’ began to occur, so that by the end of the 18th century, ‘harvest’ referred only to the work of gathering, while the name of the season was replaced by autumn, a Latinate word of unknown origin and meaning.[i]
This little story affirms for me that uneasy feeling. Few of us today do any harvesting in the autumn season. We love its bounty—in Eastern North America, a time of the first new apples and potatoes, juicy tomatoes and Concord grapes, brightly coloured squash in goofy shapes—but we do so as buyers of produce, not laborers in fields. And in the story of how harvest the season became autumn, we can glimpse a collective journey from harvest being central to all, to being the work of some. The season identified with this crucial and celebratory part of community became a season with a vague, abstract name.
It was the happiest summer of my life.
That is what the women remembering their time as Ontario Farmerettes insist upon, again and again. It’s what my mother says too.
The Farmerettes?
They were teenage girls who, during the Second World War, volunteered to bring in the harvest. Somebody had to do it. Canada didn’t import migrant workers back then. So the government organized the Ontario Farm Service Force—and thousands of adolescent girls, recruited through their high schools, signed on to spend the summer months living on a farm. While Farmerettes became the largest contingent of volunteers, the Service included six other ‘brigades’ that covered a wide spectrum of the population, from children aged 12 and up to adults and seniors. Programs were also geared to availability: from seasonal live-in commitments to occasional day labour, from year-round to holiday duties. Though it’s virtually forgotten today, the Service had 35,000 volunteers by 1945. So successful was the Farmerettes brigade that it was kept running until 1952.
At 16, my mother travelled hundreds of miles by train from her hometown of North Bay, ON to an assigned farm in the provincial south, where summers are hot and humid. She’d never seen a farm. When she arrived, she couldn’t believe the scale: “The field ran to the horizon,” she often recalls. She would work with other girls in that vast, open acreage six days a week, weeding and picking, then sorting and packing crops. They shared meals in communal bunkies, sang camp songs, went to Saturday night dances. A pittance wage on top of room and board was given. In other words, they lived in conditions much like migrant workers today, yet unlike migrants, weren’t displaced or dependent on their earnings to live. Leaving home was an adventure. While the work could be grueling, they made friends, grew confident and strong. Now in their 80s and 90s, former Farmerettes recall this period of their lives in vivid detail. My mother’s book collects their stories.
In the harvest seasons of the pandemic, 2020-2021, a hot-button area of concern was the conditions in migrant worker camps: the prevalence of illness, the threat of virus spread. None of us was supposed to mingle, let alone travel, but migrants had no choice. The harvest needed them. We needed the harvest. Meanwhile, people of all ages were kept at home, isolated, often out of work, stuck to screens. Nowhere in this concern about migrants as disease vectors did I hear the idea voiced that maybe we should take responsibility for the harvest ourselves. Maybe we should, you know, help out.
It was the happiest summer of my life.
What happens when one of the great processes of living is outsourced? If others continually bring in the harvest for us, we never reach that point when we can see what we helped grow together. When we sing harvest songs.
Few of us, I doubt, will look back on the 2020-2021 summers and autumns so fondly. What would it take for there to be a harvest movement today?
****
Around the time I set this essay draft aside, we learned of the coming hurricane. Fiona hit Nova Scotia two days after Fall Equinox, on a Friday night. We’d spent the previous days preparing the property: storing deck chairs, potted plants, tools, downspouts; weighting the trailers; locking and securing anything that might come loose. Friday evening we filled the bathtubs. I washed the dinner dishes and had just drained the sink when the lights went out.
That night I rose often and at the window shone a flashlight onto sideways rain and sideways trees bent almost to the ground. I wondered if the old hay barn, which has no doors, would go airborne. I wondered about our roof. The wind rose to an eerie pitch, a steady blast I’d never heard; it felt like a vast cathedral had opened above the house, and a god had entered it. The presence was not anger but sheer eruptive force. Some obstruction had to be cleared, some imbalance had to be set right.
The scale of the storm-god’s intensity matched the task required.
****
In the morning, trees lay blown down and broken. The lines of the forest here are permanently changed, and should I live to be 80, I will remember that night and the woods as they were before, and after.
Our power was out for the next nine days. One morning a frost sent me out to the vegetable garden in a hurry, to gather the last of my own small harvest this year. I’m a novice food grower. Growing up in a city and living in apartments, I’ve long yearned to plant seeds and tend them like I’ve long yearned to be part of raising children. I’m neither parent nor farmer, yet why should that separate me from these great cycles of life?
These cycles imprint us body and mind, as they both scour and nourish the earth. They teach us what life is about, and make it worth living. Separated from them, our lives are diminished: harvest becomes store-bought items; the next generation becomes the distant sounds of a school emptying at the end of day. Hurricanes become ‘extreme weather events’ whose larger ecological and spiritual significance—as redress of imbalance—shrink to our short-term frustration with personal inconvenience.
This weekend marked the end of harvest season here. I added compost to the soil, planted garlic, covered the beds with straw. Meanwhile, the men have been updating the old house to get it ready for winter, so I was alone in the back garden, and sang no song. Yet as I worked, tiny white dots floated all around me like motes of dust, shining in the sun. Sometimes one would land on my shirt and resolve into a bright blue creature with translucent wings and a tufted white rump. These charming blue or wooly aphids, which seem weightless, emerge out here only on warm days in late fall. If you’re not outside, you miss them entirely.
October 24, 2022
This post is the second installment in a series about my experiences living with the land here in Nova Scotia. The series began August 1, 2022. New essays will appear approximately every six weeks for one year . Thank you for reading and subscribing!
[i] John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins