Harvest Time

I love autumn. When I was a kid, we would rake up the leaves from our big oak tree and make a giant pile beside our stone wall. Then we’d take turns making believe we were shot by snipers, and performing dramatic death swoons off the wall and into the pile. Back then, before climate change and pollution made us more protective of the air we breathe, everyone just burned their leaf piles. My strongest memories of those cold, bright autumn days are the smell of burning leaves and the last, lingering warmth of Indian summer, before the long New England winter took hold.

Lately, autumn has been more metaphorical for me. This is the last third of my life, and that’s if I’m lucky. The long labor of building a family and career are mostly behind me. All of that plowing, sowing and cultivating has finally paid off. Now it’s time to harvest.

Harvest doesn’t mean leisure. As a matter of fact, it’s often the most intense part of the growing cycle. It’s a lot of work to capture the labor of a lifetime and make the most of it. But even though the need to work remains, the mindset is completely different.

After decades of scrimping and saving and planning for the future, it’s time to reap the rewards. You’d think that would be easy, but changing old habits never is. At harvest time, we have to move from a lifelong mindset of scarcity to one of abundance, or else our precious crop will end up molding and rotting in silos instead of feeding the world.

Recently, a friend of mine remarked that his impending retirement was a bit of an anticlimax. He’s always been his own boss, so there’s no one to give him a gold watch and shake his hand. To mark this transition from scarcity to abundance, we gave him a watch, and we had it engraved. The inscription was just three words: “It’s harvest time.”