We packed the car late on Monday night, slept for a few hours, then tucked Waylon into the car-seat and drove away at 3:45 am, south-bound for New Jersey to meet our new nephew. Before that, a long list of things to do:

• cover all the crops with remay in case of frost
• bring all onions and garlic to my parents’ house for storage (by next year we’ll have storage in the farm store, but for now the wind still whips through the barn boards and uninsulated walls…so off to Barre it is)
• Complete the ditch needed to bring electric wiring over to the farm store
• make pesto (parsley, cilantro)
• pick up random stuff on the ground
• clean yurt
• make snacks for the road

The wood pile is half-split and the ditch is almost done, but 40 containers of pesto are stacked in the freezer, the onions and garlic are safely stowed at my parents’, the garden is transformed into rows of white covers, and we managed to leave the yurt in a respectable state and had a half dozen banana-almond muffins for the drive.

In the midst of it all, we’ve had rain for most of the last week, an element we are rejoicing over with the hope that enough will pour down to replenish our well before the snow sets in.  Even when it washed down on us during last Thursday’s harvest, we smiled to see the pond filling up and the world around us dripping with water.

We didn’t mind the rain that pummeled the windshield as we made our way in the early morning darkness down to New Jersey, where here, too, the clouds have gathered, but we don’t mind that, either–after all, how is a child supposed to learn about puddles without the rain?