I HAVE NEVER BEEN HAPPIER TO SEE FALL
I love fall. I know that’s not exactly a groundbreaking opinion, particularly for a woman who owns a flower company and now lives on a small farm in the Pacific Northwest. Give me a sweater, something pumpkin- or cinnamon-flavored, and a fire in the fireplace, and I’m in. But this year, I’m not just excited for fall. I am deeply, profoundly, possibly unreasonably relieved that summer is over.
Summer is almost always our hardest season at Farmgirl. Flowers probably aren’t the first thing on your mind when you’re juggling vacations, kids home from school, camp schedules, weddings, delayed flights, and a house that is somehow never cool enough. After doing this for nearly sixteen years, I know sales slow down in the summer. We plan for it. We tighten our belts, keep our heads down, and remind ourselves that fall is coming.
But this summer was different. This summer almost killed me. Which I know sounds melodramatic—and it is, a bit. I know there are people doing far harder things than I am. At the same time, this one definitely goes on the list as one of the harder seasons we’ve had in a very long time—and maybe the hardest we’ve ever had that didn’t involve a global pandemic.
Sales slowed down, as they usually do, but then Google rolled out a series of changes that caused our traffic to fall off a cliff. It helps a little to know this is happening to so many businesses, but that saying about misery loving company doesn’t actually solve any problems—or pay any bills. We’ve spent fifteen years building a company people could find when they searched for flowers, and seemingly overnight, the rules changed. Again.
At the same time, shipping costs kept climbing. Fuel surcharges alone are killing us, which feels especially bananas when fuel prices aren’t behaving in a way that would make that make sense. We’re paying significantly more to ship fewer packages from locations closer to our customers, and I’ve spent more hours than I care to count trying to understand how that math is mathing. Super-obvious spoiler alert: it isn’t.
Those are not little problems. They’re the kind of business problems that need quiet, focused time—the sort where you close the door, open twelve spreadsheets, scribble on whiteboards, question every life choice that brought you to that moment, and eventually find a way through. The only issue was that we had somehow packed our summer schedule with something every single week: travel, shoots, meetings, events, offsites, product design, projects, building, planting, more travel, and more shoots. They were all things I genuinely wanted to do and was grateful to be doing, but there was always somewhere to go, something to prepare for, or someone waiting on an answer.
That meant there wasn’t enough time during regular working hours to tackle the problems keeping me awake at night. And you know what that means: you work on them during the irregular working hours. Early mornings, late nights, Saturdays, Sundays, and the hours when you should be spending time with family and friends—or sleeping. Instead, you’re staring at a spreadsheet and asking Claude, “Why did our website traffic suddenly collapse, and what can I do about it?” Then you spend hundreds of hours trying every single thing your new business consultant Claude tells you to do.
Oh, and did I mention that we are also building a flower farm? Because apparently running a flower company during the most challenging summer we’ve had wasn’t enough. We were also planting thousands of things, installing irrigation, putting down weed cloth, building barns, moving dirt, ordering equipment, and trying to learn approximately four thousand things about farming that I probably should have known before deciding to build a farm.
I do have to say, though, that the learning has been amazing—across marketing, operations, and farming—and I’m trying to focus on that silver lining. But by the end of August, I felt like every part of my life was yelling at me at once. Every problem was urgent, every decision had another decision hiding underneath it, and I couldn’t think much beyond whatever was immediately in front of me.
The world has felt that way too lately, at least to me. Everything seems louder, angrier, and meaner than it used to. Every time I open my phone, someone is furious with someone else. People are calling complete strangers terrible names. I know that firsthand because after nearly every press opportunity we’re fortunate enough to get, people feel the need to reach out just to tell me how horrible I look. We’re talking at each other instead of to each other, and it feels like everyone is walking around just plain mad at everything and everyone. Maybe we’re all just really, really tired. I know I am.
Then, a few mornings ago, I walked outside at the Farmquarters with my coffee and realized the air had changed. It was cooler. The light was softer. There was that damp, earthy smell that only seems to happen when summer has started loosening its grip. For the first time in months, I needed a sweater.
Nothing had been solved overnight. Google had not written to apologize or offer to fix our traffic problem. UPS had not decided to refund our fuel surcharges. My inbox was still full, and there were still about a million things on my to-do list. But for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could take a full breath.
That might be what I love most about living somewhere with real seasons again. I spent a lot of years in California, where one beautiful day rolls fairly seamlessly into another beautiful day. I didn’t know how much I missed seasons until I had them back. There is something comforting about watching the entire world around you change course. The light shifts, the trees start turning, and the garden stops trying so hard. Everything that has been growing at full speed all summer begins to slow down, pull inward, and let go.
And none of it apologizes for doing less. The trees don’t wonder if dropping their leaves will hurt productivity. The dahlias don’t feel guilty that their season is ending. The garden doesn’t schedule a strategy meeting to discuss how it can maintain summer-level output through December. Everything just seems to accept that there is a season for growing and a season for resting.
I am not especially good at the resting part. I have spent most of my life believing that if something isn’t working, the answer is to work harder. And, to be fair, that has gotten me through a lot. Farmgirl would not be here if I hadn’t been willing to outwork problems that should have taken us down, over and over again. But this summer reminded me that working harder and working endlessly are not the same thing. You need enough room to think, enough quiet to notice what isn’t working, and enough time to fix the real problem instead of sprinting from one urgent thing to the next.
So this fall, I’m trying to make some room. Not a lot of room—let’s not get carried away. We’re heading into our busiest season, and there is still a flower farm to build and a company to run. But I’m trying to leave a little more white space in the calendar, to stop filling every open square before it has a chance to become something useful, and to believe that not every good opportunity has to happen right now.
I’m also leaning very hard into anything that makes life feel warmer and softer: sweaters, soup, lamps instead of overhead lights, and, of course, flowers in every room. None of those things will fix Google, shipping costs, or everything that feels broken in the world right now. I know that. But warmth, beauty, and making someone feel cared for still count.
Sending flowers to someone who has had a terrible week won’t change the whole world, but it might change their day. Being patient with someone who gets something wrong won’t end the collective anger we seem to be living in, but it means there is one less angry interaction in it. Maybe cozy is more than an aesthetic. Maybe it’s a way of moving through the world a little more gently.
I hope so. And that’s what I’m most looking forward to this fall—not just cooler temperatures or changing leaves, but the possibility that slowing down might soften us. That spending more time at home might remind us what home is for. That taking better care of our own little corners of the world might leave us with a bit more patience for everyone else.
Summer almost took me out, but fall feels right on time. So here’s to cooler mornings, earlier nights, softer light, lower expectations, and being a little nicer to each other.
I think we could all use it.
With love,
Christina
