Fall began today, or tomorrow. I can’t be sure unless I check a calendar. It’s the autumnal equinox – the point at which the sun shines equally on both hemispheres of a tilted Earth. In the Southern Hemisphere, the September change ushers in the warmth, and for us in the northern clime, it brings the cold. Each day of the next 90 is a gradual transition until the day length encloses us in its cold embrace – the ground frosty and the sky dark. Until then, we revel in the gradual cooling of a warming planet.

I wake up slowly and luxuriously – the way I only can on a Saturday morning. My window is open. The air is cooler than it was yesterday. The breeze from my window smells crisp. Though my wake is gradual, the sounds that greet me are earnest. The cows are crying out for their calves, weaned yesterday and sold in nearly the same moment. There was no point in waiting this year. The prices encouraged, nay, demanded the sale. Sold private treaty in a matter of hours for more per pound than a cyclical and predictable cattle cycle ever thought possible.

The cows will settle when their milk dries up and the pull of their udders is less insistent. They will contend their motherly instincts with the next calf that is ripening in their uterus. As the cold approaches, each day they will eat less green grass and more seasoned hay. Their bellies will expand, as will their appetites. Each year, God willing, as predictable as the equinox, they will calve and forget about the previous calves they now cry out for – calves born and sold during the equinoxes, the midpoints of the year. One, ushering in the lengthening of the days; the other is its closure.

The days will get shorter because there is no alternative. The calves will be sold because that is the alternative.