I just couldn’t stay at the farm this morning to watch. It felt too much like watching your baby go into surgery and seeing the surgeon move in with the knife. Yes, yes, those trenches and gaping holes are for infrastructure that will make the farm much more viable, more productive, and the earth will heal once the dirt is filled back in. But for now, it was a little too much for me to stand by as the excavator ripped a five foot deep, yard-wide swath the length of our lower pasture. Its massive, wide-set treads ripped up several times that breadth on the surface as it moved along, and I’d be in denial if I didn’t recognize that the process of scraping the berm of excavated dirt back into the trench will lay waste to whatever was growing beneath it.

Yes, the earth abides and today’s scars are mere scratches on the surface that will be healed and all but invisible in a couple of years. But for now, oh, the broken limbs and torn earth are just a bit too much for me to watch.