It seems almost everyone I chat with of late is gripped by a high level of anxiety. Many friends report disrupted sleep. I have it too. I find myself wakened by dreams in which my world is disordered. People come and release the animals or carry them. My car is borrowed, but not returned. In my dream last night, a judge, with whom I and my adversary were in some trouble earlier this week for missing a deadline to submit a joint letter, made a sudden appearance here on the farm. (Thankfully, my anxious reaction was alleviated when I saw that she was visiting as a veterinarian making a house call, albeit treating a person — not an animal — outside the barn).

A neighbor told me that this high level of upset has to do with the moon being in retrograde. I am relatively certain that it has much more to do with two identifiable sources much closer at hand: One, uncertainty over the election, particularly whether even a clear and decisive result will resolve our state of political instability or will send us into a cycle of disintegration and violence. Two, the long predicted fall spike of the COVID-19 pandemic. My own concern is much less about becoming infected than it is about a months’ long return to stricter social isolation and the economic consequences of a new extended lockdown.

There are of course many ways to address anxiety. One friend has begun taking medication, with not entirely satisfactory results. I have turned to the garden. I have long recognized the zen like peace which gardening provides. I didn’t require Rebecca Mead’s August article in the New Yorker on "The Therapeutic Power of Gardening" to tell me that gardening, by connecting us with a cosmic order, soothes the soul.

The standard fall cleanup tasks (taking up stakes, bringing in hoses) give the illusion of restoring order. Harvesting the fall vegetables alleviates fears of want by provisioning to get through hard times. I’ve been experimenting with pickling thinly sliced black radishes and julienned daikon radishes to have as condiments through the winter. Turnip leaf kimchee, which I last made 10 years ago, is also on my agenda.

Perhaps most centering, though, is fall planting. This year, I’ve returned to planting garlic, which I skipped last year. But I also decided to do try directly sowing leeks. Frequently in past years we wintered over any large leeks still in the garden by heavily mulching them, and they always came back in the spring. This year, having missed my spring planting, I cleared trenches and planted leek seeds just a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to our ample recent rains I’m already seeing their tiny sprouts emerge (gorgeous mushrooms, too; see above). I will before the first really hard frost mulch these in, and fully expect they’ll give me a head start on the spring garden. What I’ve read suggests that it will work. And doing this reinforces the feeling that there’s a future with something to look forward to.

Which brings me to what we always look forward to this year, but may lose: the holidays. Dr. Fauci this week suggested that we write off Thanksgiving. It will come as a big disappointment to many who were counting on having the feast in some form or other. I know this because I’ve received four emails in the last week hoping to put in orders for a heritage breed turkey, to which I’ve had to respond, unfortunately, “no turkeys this year.”

It’s not because Dr. Fauci told me not to raise them. It’s because other setbacks intervened to erase our signature product. You may recall that when In September, 2018, my partner Peter died, it was our helper Peter Siegenthaler’s efforts that allowed us to bring the turkeys through that season. But that was our last b