Some Things You Might Notice at a Farm in a Day

1. Your body moving. Especially your arms as they lift, your knees bending, the curve of your back as you move down the bed, weeding.

2. Light. On radishes in early morning, darkening the spinach in late afternoon. The way it saddens and deepens the evening as it softens. Shinning all over the pumpkins, making them glow rounder, fuller. How it dazzles when you walk into it. The way it makes dry leaves into glitter. On your hands as you pull tomatoes from the vine. How it changes the texture of the sky.

3. Eleven geese flying south in perfect formation. Their sleek backs against the blue sky, their wings moving in rhythm like small black waves. Their calls, which are like the sound a heart might make, flying away.

4. The unique color of one red onion as you clean a crate of them. Dark burgundy, plum-metallic, gleaming.

5. The scent of garlic on your hands.

6. Sudden wind that shakes the trees and rips through the tall rows of amaranth and sunflowers, bringing with it the scent of evening: sharp and musky, like sweet hay and freshly-tilled soil.

7. The sun on your back.

8. Green kale that turns to silver in cold water. Yellow tomatoes. White turnips. Purple beets, their greens veined with red. Sweet peppers marbled yellow and green, like grass in early May. The miracle that all these things come from the earth.

9. Thirst.