Julyvalanche

You’re swimming.  Your head is above water. But the current is strong and is sweeping you downstream faster than you want to admit to yourself.  You’re fatigued, but know that until you reach calmer waters, you need to keep paddling just to keep your head above water. So you just keep paddling.
This is what the weeks feel like now.  I heard a farmer friend call it the Julyvalanche.  Everything is happening now.  At the end of each day, I think the end of the week will be a break in action—a moment to relax and breath, but when Sunday arrives, there are always still things to do—house to clean, okra to pick, laundry to wash.  And then Monday whirls around again like a riptide and we’re off again.

​I know the shore will come.  It always does.  We never actually drown.  By now, we are intimate with the cycles of farm life.  And now, well, now is the Julyvalanche. 

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