Dear Folks,
At the beginning of this new year, I should re-introduce Foundation Farm and the characters who live here, for the benefit of the many new subscribers to the Dana Meadows News Service, and for the amusement of the original subscribers, some of whom know us very well, many of whom have lived here or visited at one time or another.
The farm is 72 acres of New England rock and swamp and cold clay soil, located in the Connecticut River Valley on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. The view from our front lawn is New Hampshire in the foreground, and in the background is Mt. Ascutney, 8 miles away in Vermont. A big stream, Blow-Me-Down Brook, flows through the middle of the farm. We have ambitions to harness it for hydropower some day. The old gristmill site for Plainfield Village is located just downhill from our house. But for the moment the beavers have the brook to themselves, and every now and then they turn it into a lake that floods our lower pasture.
Last year we bought 8 acres of hayfield bordering the brook at the north end of our land, far from the house (by the back swimming-hole). We don’t need the hay now, so we’ve leased it out to a neighbor. The field we hay for our sheep is 5 acres, high up, within sight of Plainfield Village, at the western extreme of our land. Coming down Daniels Road from the village to the house, you pass that field first, then a 3-acre fenced sheep pasture full of clover, then after a steep drop you come to the big sheep pasture, about 8 acres, with a small pond in it where we go skating. Then you cross two bridges over two branches of the brook, climb a little hill, and you come to the house. Near the house are about 1/2 acre of vegetable garden, 20 fruit trees, and assorted, chicken-ravaged flower beds. All the rest of the farm is forest.
The oldest parts of the house were built in 1820, and, as is typical of New England, various parts were stuck on over the years, right up to our own additions in the 1970s. We’ve added a full basement, which is John’s carpentry shop, a big back porch, a bedroom, and, separate from the house, a woodshed/garage, a tractor shed, a chicken house, and a sheepshed. The house is rambling and in places crumbling, though not as crumbling as when we started work on it. It’s always on the boundary between messy and neat, between beat-up and repaired, between funky and stylish, reflecting all the energy of all the life that is lived in it. At present the house shelters 5 adults, 1 kid, 3 dogs, and 3 cats, and outside there are 9 sheep (8 of which are pregnant, I hope) and 40 chickens.
Allow me to introduce the members of the household.
I’m 45, an aspiring columnist and occasionally a professor at Dartmouth College. I resigned my proper professorship a few years ago because I wanted more time for writing and for traveling to work with resource-management people all over the world. Then I guaranteed that I would do the writing by sticking myself with a weekly deadline. I’m trying to make the column support me financially and have expanded it now to 17 papers (BULLETIN: The New London CT Day and the Greenfield MA Reformer have just signed on!). Since it doesn’t yet support me, I add to my fun and income by teaching one course a year at Dartmouth and by doing consulting work, about which you will hear more as the year progresses. I’m the chief animal-lover and gardener of the farm.
Dennis Meadows, 44, is a professor at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, but he’s not an engineer, which is a source of some trouble. He is a systems analyst and lately a designer of management training games for resource managers. He and I have been partners for years in international work having to do with resources and the environment, which we still do very fruitfully together, although we were divorced last year. We live together amicably and still jointly own the farm. We thought we’d start a new trend called living together after marriage.
Dennis is stretching and looking around at this point in his life and is both developing new options here and looking to see if he could be more useful elsewhere. He has just started a new consulting company called the Resource Systems Group, which is off to a good start and keeping him very busy. He spends hours on the computer every day (there are between 4 and 10 computers in the house at any time, 3 of which are used heavily); he has a busy teaching schedule; he jogs religiously every morning; as the biggest, toughest guy on the farm he’s the one who gets to lift the heavy weights and tackle and shear the sheep. He also likes to drive the tractor and chop down trees.
Suzanne MacDonald, 34, has lived here part-time for six years. She works for the Merriam Hill Center, which has offices in Cambridge Mass. and Greenville NH, so Suzanne usually spends 3-4 days a week in one of those places and the rest of the time at Foundation Farm. What is Merriam Hill Center? Its form and mission are evolving, but basically it is an educational institution that helps people work together in groups in what I would call transcendant ways — ways that honor and develop each person’s individual specialness and that also produce an outstanding group result.
Suzanne is a good representative of that concept. She is a listener, a worker, a facilitator, a person around whom other people feel good. I guess her big problem is that everyone, including us, wants her to be with them full time, so her life is fairly fractionated. Just now she’s at another place where she’s always welcome and where she usually spends a month each year, the spiritual community of Auroville in India. She first went to Auroville on behalf of Merriam Hill, to study how such an intentional community worked. She’s been going back regularly ever since.
Around the farm Suzanne is a cleaner-upper of messes, an avid gardener, my helper with the sheep, a walker-in-forests and sitter-by-streams, a source of celebrations and playfulness, and the person we all tell our troubles to.
John Zimmer, 42, moved in two years ago with his dog Moses and, on weekends and school vacations, his daughter Brenna. Brenna’s mother Beverly lives across town, so Brenna can get on one schoolbus and go there or another bus to come here. At the time John moved in, he and Beverly were just getting a divorce.
John was once a systems engineer for IBM, and then for awhile he taught computer science at Kimball Union Academy. Now he has given up the world of computers (in this computer-populated house he never touches one) and has become a carpenter. In summer he does outside construction work, in winter he is a cabinet-maker. He is a meticulous craftsman, often impoverishing himself by working too long and carefully and charging too little. He doesn’t like to work with others who have different quality standards, so usually he is self-employed. Just by word-of-mouth recommendations he has much more work than he can do.
John is quiet and steady, he jokes a lot, but he also takes most things very seriously, and sometimes he’s up-tight. He’s a hard worker around the farm, a contributor to all sorts of community organizations and causes, and a totally devoted father. He plays basketball or squash or tennis at least 3 nights a week, and he’s the soccer coach at the grade school (Brenna’s on the team). He’s a good fixer of things, an enthusiastic gardener, and a good bread-baker. His new girlfriend Kat, a small, peppy redhead, is often here at the farm. She’s a terrific cook.
Brenna, who is 10 going on 16, is pretty and smart and impatient, usually sweet and loving, sometimes stubborn and angry, quite domineering, a prolific writer of adventure stories, a terrible speller, good at all sports, funny and exasperating. We love having her around, mostly. The whole place is more alive when she’s with us.
Kate Read, 28, our newest household member, moved in with her dog Dillon just a year ago. She was just breaking up with her boyfriend Marc and needed an emergency place to stay for a few months. She’s been here ever since. Kate manages the Upper Valley Food Coop, where we buy all the food we don’t raise ourselves, and she is a calm, collected, supercapable person. She’s tall and slim and, to my way of thinking, a natural beauty. Kate and Marc still have an off-again, on-again relationship, so sometimes we see a lot of Marc at the farm, and sometimes not. We also don’t see much of Kate; she works long hours and is involved in many community activities.
Kate is unsettled in her life, not only about Marc, but also about her job, which really doesn’t use her full capabilities. She is a lot smarter and more capable than she gives herself credit for. She’s searching for something more challenging, but doesn’t yet know what it is.
Dennis and Suzanne and John are also searching, so sometimes I jokingly call the place Transition Farm. I wonder whether it isn’t just a little too comfortable here, since people tend to sink in instead of pushing forward. I alternate between trying to make people comfortable and trying to push them and maybe don’t do enough of either. But, given all the people living in transition, we form a remarkably stable and harmonious and mutually-supportive group, and I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
The farm has a long history of comings and goings — Dennis and I have never counted up, but probably 50 different people have lived here in the 15 years we’ve been here. I like the comings and hate the goings, but over the years I’ve become adaptable, no matter what happens. Most people leave to go on to something better, something they’ve really wanted, a new house or new job or new educational opportunity, so I can rejoice with them, even though I miss them. And somehow new people show up and the house is always full.
We all pay a monthly rent into the Foundation Farm account, out of which we pay all running expenses of the farm. Earnings from sheep and wool also go into that account. Kate sells our eggs at the Coop, so the egg money just goes against the food bill. Kate does most of the food shopping and every month we calculate how much it cost us per person per day to eat and repay her. Our daily food expense varies between $2.50 and $3.50 per person per day. When there are major capital investments to be made, like a new roof or an additional 8 acres of land, Dennis and I pay for it. We’re working on turning the farm into a “condominium”, which will mean in our case jointly-owned land upon which people can build individually-owned houses. That way Suzanne or John, who may decide they want to stay here, can have equity in the place, and we can finance new buildings, which will allow more people to live here.
Farm work is divided very informally. Mostly people do what they like best, and somehow the work gets done. All of us but Dennis bake bread and sometimes we fight over who gets to make it next. We used to each have one night a week to cook, but our schedules are so irregular that whoever gets to the kitchen first ends up cooking. Dennis usually is up first and makes oatmeal or pancakes or omelettes for breakfast. We all like cooking and we eat well. Usually someone who didn’t cook helps do the dishes. Kate and John haul more than their share of firewood; Dennis does more than his share of cutting and splitting the wood; Suzanne and I are the primary housecleaners; I mainly do the animal chores; Suzanne, John and I are the gardeners; Dennis and John are the carpenters and mechanics and snow-shovelers. Most things get done smoothly with no discussion, no system, and no problem.
People always ask “how do you get along together in a commune?” as if it’s any different from getting along in a family or at work or any other place where there are other human beings. It isn’t any different. Basically everyone is kind and responsible and respectful of each other, and every now and then there are hurts or disagreements that have to be patched up, usually about the most trivial things.
Sponges, for instance. The most divisive issue on Foundation Farm recently has been sponges.
Some people imagine that there are two kinds of sponges in the world: the clean kind that you use for washing dishes and cleaning tables, and the dirty kind you use for wiping up spills on floors. These people have conniptions if you mistakenly use a Dish Sponge on the floor. They are literally sickened if they catch you using a Floor Sponge on dishes.
To other people, who have studied microbiology at Harvard and have a deeper understanding of these things, all sponges are perfect media for the rapid proliferation of bacteria, and there is No Such Thing as a Clean Sponge. They find the dish/floor distinction to be spurious and can’t be bothered with it.
Then there are people who just have more important things on their minds than sponges and who grab the nearest sponge when they have a spongeing job to do and never think about cleanness or dirtiness at all.
After months of discussion, the people who are either unconscious about or disdainful of sponge-distinctions acknowledged that, although they themselves just could not get exercised in the matter, they really didn’t want to drive their housemates wild by using the “wrong” sponge for the “wrong” purpose. For the sake of household peace of mind, they tried to shape up in the area of sponges, but found it hard to remember which sponge was which and were often caught performing terrible infractions of the Sponge Rules.
Well, I’m happy to report that capable Kate finally found the answer to the sponge problem. She declared that henceforth all Dish Sponges would be yellow and all Floor Sponges would be pink and did the appropriate shopping to implement this policy. Dennis helped out by posting handy signs in public places: “When it comes to sponges on dishes, remember Yellow is Mellow, but Pink Stinks!”
We have now all caught on to the system, and peace reigns. There is still a little testiness in the house, however, on the issue of whose dog is getting into the garbage when we put it out every Wednesday. (My suspicion is that it’s all three.)
I’m just back from a week in Oklahoma City, where I gave a five-day seminar on resource management to 28 top students from the Oklahoma state university system. I used two neat training games that Dennis devised, plus lectures and discussions, and it went very well. I was impressed by the students. Oklahoma has been hit badly by the oil and farm depressions, Half my students have had their banks fail over the past year. The market value of their houses is dropping faster than they are paying off their mortgages, so they are feeling more and more in the hole. I have probably never before had such a rapt and accepting audience when I talked about economic cycles!
On the way to Oklahoma I got to visit my father in Illinois and my brother in Wisconsin, and on the way home I visited my Mom and Dennis’s folks in Arkansas, so it was a great trip.
And I’m glad to be home. There’s lots of snow, as there should be in January, the woodstoves are keeping us cozy, the long evenings are good for writing and spinning and knitting. By March I’ll be sick of winter, but now I’m enjoying it.
Love, Dana
