Smoke Light

It was novel, until it wasn’t, until one day, walking outside, I knew, not by the smell—my nose has never been so sensitive—but by the golden-green quality of the light. I checked my phone and yes, red AQI, breathing Canada’s dying forests.

I once dated a painter, long distance, who was as in love with light as I am. We would send each other photos of sunlit corners, dappled grass, sparkling pools. I wonder, now, if she can identify smoke light, too.

A few years ago. Early Monday, as I drove north to the farm, the sun was a melon disk, so dimmed and crisp-edged that I thought it was the full moon lit pink in sunrise.

Mid-September. Below, yellow stubble of wheat fields, goldenrod dimming at this end of summer. I dismissed the idea that it was smoke from the West, all the way here in Minnesota. Don’t be so dramatic, I told myself, always seeing harbingers. Still, I nearly drove off the road trying to get a good look.

Then later, Jeff—Did you see the sun this morning? Smoke from the West. Lauren said she’d dreamt the sky was on fire.

That was before our phones showed AQI alongside temperature. We didn’t consider it might be dangerous to work outside. We spent the afternoon harvesting the most beautiful pumpkins. Delicate French ones—pale peach with lacing warts like peanuts. Teardrop shaped Japanese ones the color of, well, fire. Pie pumpkins with pert little stems. My favorite, a huge, squashed globe with perfect pumpkin scalloping, cool waxy flesh, round and orange as that little straining sun that morning. They sprawled, tangled with each other, hid huge in the overgrown grasses lining the field. We cut their spiky stems, hauled them in plastic bins until I had twin bruises on my hip bones from bracing the weight. Until I resented the abundance, just a little.

I’ve read about crop failure and resource wars, have been flattened by grief and fear over what is to come, what has already come to some parts of the world. I was on the farm because I wanted to learn something about how to sustain life, because I thought it might be useful someday, but also, because I wanted to learn how to touch the stuff of my survival. I wanted to find dirt whorled into my fingerprints.

We shouldn’t say the “new normal,” I read, because that desensitizes us to the changes. And because the bar keeps moving. New no longer contains normal, is a state of worsening.

We set the squash on the edge of the field in an undulating band. They delighted me, lined up like that, a river of pumpkins, pale yellow to orange to forest green.

How to live with this embarrassment of bounty under smoky sky. Now, the painter paints hyperrealistic flowers as large as humans. Saturated with color, cast in light and shadow, they are not passive objects of the gaze, as the artist explains, but subjects in their own right, threatening and seductive at once. Falling into the translucent veined petal of a lily, the fiery abyss of a poppy, I wonder if I have ever seen a flower before.

She’s working on a series documenting delicate orchids in Borneo before they are lost to a heating planet. But, she admits, she also just wants to be surrounded by color and beauty.

The squash will be moved to the hoop house, laid on grated metal tables to cure. After weeks, those not sold at the farmer’s market or the co-op will develop soft dark dimples I can stick a finger through, or cave in suddenly, half a face collapsed to reveal a moist, stringy interior. I will take some of the salvageable ones home, make them into soups and pies, redistribute what I can to friends. But dozens will become compost or chicken feed.

I didn’t learn much about being a farmer. The farm was lovingly but chaotically run, and I didn’t join until harvest season, so I know only how to pick, but nothing about planting. I tired easily and became bored of the tedium. What I did learn was how to eat more slowly, how to chew, how to remember all the labor to bring food from seed to plate.

I don’t know what the lesson is here. Only that I am still trying to learn how to love what I have before it is lost. And also, that even the smoke light is beautiful.

Read more from Issue No. 35 or share on Twitter.