Dear Folks,
They say it might get up to +5 degrees today. It was -20 last night and will be again tonight. We’ve gone from one of the warmest Decembers ever to a January that is about to break the all-time record for the number of successive days in which the temperature drops below zero.
There is a lot of wind to deepen the chill and still no snow to speak of (a slight dusting, blown into drifts amidst bare spots, not enough, Libby tells me, to sled without bumping). This is the worst kind of winter for plants. I fear for the fruit trees I planted and the perennials I moved over from Foundation Farm, though all are well mulched.
Oil has just hit $1.30 a gallon. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to move from tight, wood-heated, wind-protected Foundation Farm to the leaky, oil-heated Hunt House facing straight into the north wind. We also just received the highest electric bill I’ve ever seen. I’m going to have to do detective work on the circuits to see how the same number of people in a much smaller house can be using twice as much electricity.
I keep telling myself this will be a good baseline year to demonstrate how much energy you can save by retrofitting an old farmhouse. Just think how many energy-sieves like this people live in, all over this region! At high expense, with significant discomfort, and making irreversible changes in the climate.
Actually, while I wouldn’t call the extremities of this place toasty, especially not my bedroom, we are cozy enough. Michael installed a small woodstove in our kitchen, which has our only functional chimney. (The central chimney with the fireplace in the living room can’t be used until I get it repaired and relined, which the masons won’t do until spring.) The kitchen is in its own wing, so the heat from that woodstove only marginally warms the rest of the house, but even marginally is a help. If we get chilled we can go sit in the warm kitchen and make tea.
With all the cooks in the house, the kitchen is an interesting and nice-smelling place to be. I just made a potato salad from our fingerlings and fresh eggs and a jar of Kerry’s corn relish. Kerry is thawing out blueberries for a pie. I brought a pumpkin up from the basement to make pumpkin muffins. We live well! And we’re getting along well with each other. I love playing music with Marsha and watching “Anne of Green Gables” with Libby and “African Queen” with Stephen and Kerry. (In winter we watch at least one video a week; in summer there’s no time.)
We are just beginning to notice the days getting longer. These bitter cold days always mean bright sun, which is presently shining through the office window onto my back. Michael has been making the rounds of all the leaky, loose windows, caulking and weather-stripping and tightening. We already feel the difference. So no real complaints. Life is good. We’ve been doing the seed orders. January will pass.
Given a new year and century and millennium, and for us a new farm and household, I should re-introduce this place and its inhabitants to you — especially for the newcomers to this letter and old-timers who haven’t managed to follow the flurry of recent changes.
So — driving north toward Hartland Four Corners on Vermont Route 12, you see from far away the north-south ridge of Cobb Hill and our high pasture climbing up alongside the sugarbush. When you get to the Four Corners intersection and look to the left, you see the Unitarian church and Skunk Hollow Tavern, next to one another, half a block down. (On the hill above them is the lay practice center of the followers of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nath Hahn.) Look to the right from the Four Corners and you see the barn-red Hunt house, right at the edge of the village. Turn right and go half a block on Mace Hill Road and the whole farmstead comes into view — Roger’s trailer, the two silos, the complex of barns and sugarhouse and equipment shed, the gypsy chickenmobile, Cobb Hill rising up behind.
Foundation Farm was private, set back from a seldom-traveled road, no neighbors in sight, never a need for curtains. Here we’re right on the road, neighbors on all sides except the west, behind the barns and sugarhouse, where the land slopes up and the cohousing project will be built. Looking north out our kitchen and dining room windows, we see first the long line of Foundation Farm perennials I transplanted, then the frame for the hoop house Stephen just put up for spring seed starts, then the 15-acre field that will be our major production garden, then, in the distance, a subdivision that was carved out of another prime field that used to belong to this farm. (Sigh!) To the south of the Hunt house is an abandoned garden, about as big as my garden in Plainfield, where Marsha and I are making big plans for flowers and vegetables and small fruits to supply the household.
That’s the basic scenery. I haven’t introduced you to the Curtis farm, because we can’t see it from here, though we love to walk there over the high pasture and through the sugarbush. There are lots of trails up on the ridge. Because of the snowlessness, we can still hike them, we can’t ski them, we have yet to see a snowmobile — but in a normal winter this farm is a snowmobile thruway.
Now I need to introduce the animals.
Out in the barn, and, when it isn’t too raw and windy, still grazing the first rise of pasture, are:
– The Norwegian Fjord mares Mari and Cassima, being trained as workhorses.
– The big brown workhorse Bill, bought to work with and calm down Mari and Cassima. Now Stephen and Kerry are trying to sell him.
– The five yearling Jersey heifers, Maple, Linden, Butternut, Birch, and Alder. They’re just about ready to breed; in the fall when they have calves, Kerry and Stephen will start milking and cheese-making.
Inside the barn are three small calves, just a few weeks old, the youngest just shifting from bottle-feeding to milk out of a bucket. I wonder how such tiny things survive this cold weather, but they’re healthy and growing and SO cute! They’re also Jerseys; their names are Willow, Hazel, and Cedar. In spring we’ll go get two Brown Swiss calves (now gestating), which will be named Oak and Ash. That will be our milking herd, the older five in production late this year, the younger five next year.
To the south of the barn next to the silos is the gypsy chickenmobile with about 60 Buff Orpington, Black Australorpe, and Aracauna hens, plus two roosters.
A barn cat has been here from before we bought the place. She’s quite fat; I think Roger feeds her. I don’t think she has a name. We have two dogs, Marsha’s yellow long-legged Chi and Stephen and Kerry’s furry, foxy, shy, dancing Rudy. At any given time there are a couple neighbor dogs around too. Inside the house are three more cats, Jimmy and Latte (of Cobb Hill Comix fame) and Libby’s cat Katy. (My dog Emmett and my Kitty were left with Jim and the loggers at Foundation Farm and seem to be thriving there.)
Now for the people:
Dana Meadows (58) — tall, graying, overweight, very opinionated, restless, energetic, always starting more projects than she can finish, wildly idealistic and visionary, generally cheerful except when angry at the state of the world. Teaches part time at Dartmouth, writes stuff, tries to direct the Sustainability Institute, knits socks incessantly (hey, it makes long community meetings tolerable!), plays classical music on the piano but never practices. Fills up the whole damn place with books.
Marsha Carmichael (52) — short, thin (from my perspective, anyway), physically tough, psychologically resilient and adventurous, with a dry wit that doubles me up on a regular basis. Resident carpenter and bookshelf builder. Doodles around on many instruments (flute, clarinet, drum, guitar, piano) with a range that extends from classical to jazz. Marsha lost both her husband and her only child within the past few years and is courageously creating a new life for herself. Recently sold her farm in southwest Michigan and moved here to join Cobb Hill — an act of foolishness or bravery, or maybe a combination of the two. Works as a computer lab assistant at Windsor High School, but is thinking she’d like to be a teacher. Has practiced many trades from typesetting and proofreading to working with the down-and-out in Benton Harbor, Michigan. A warrior for equity and justice.
Stephen Leslie (38) and Kerry Gawalt (24) — our farmers, my housemates for more than three years now, somehow sent here from Idaho by a beneficient universe. Stephen spent six years as a Benedictine monk at the Weston Priory, where he learned good lessons about living in community. He’s an artist and novelist, an Irish romantic, a dedicated yoga practitioner and teacher, a coyote mischief-maker, a wise and compassionate soul. Kerry was raised in the tradition of Waldorf school and Rudolph Steiner, mainly at Hawthorne Valley Farm in the Hudson Valley. That’s where she and Stephen met — he was there doing an internship in organic vegetable growing. She’s a bundle of energy, a tireless worker, an effortless cook. (Jim and the loggers hire her to food-shop and cook for them one day a week, during which she calmly turns out eight loaves of bread, two soups, three or four main dishes and some desserts.) Kerry can learn anything with the speed of light; currently she’s doing EMT training and taking accounting courses. In the winter she works as an accountant and cashier at the Upper Valley Food Coop. She’s also the Cobb Hill accountant. Stephen and Kerry were married at Cobb Hill, over next to the pond at the Curtis farm, on a green summer afternoon a year and a half ago.
Michael (33), Amanda (40), and Libby (10) Walden.– the most recent gift sent by the beneficent universe. Michael and Amanda heard of Cobb Hill at Hawthorne Valley and arrived last fall to talk about farming with Stephen and Kerry. They share the same farming philosophy, so they moved in to help us through what turned out to be an arduous move. Michael picked up some work at a nearby flower farm and at the Upper Valley Coop and is proving to be a welcome jack-of-all-trades around here. He’s just been offered a job managing the flower farm next year and the challenge of turning it organic. Amanda, who has been a Waldorf teacher, has been home-schooling Libby through their various moves, but now Libby’s about to go to a Waldorf school near here. Amanda’s expecting another child next August. Probably that will mean they’ll need more space than we have here and they’ll move out to some place very nearby. Whether the Waldens will want to, or be able to, join Cobb Hill is also up in the air, but like everyone else in this house, they seem to be adventurers, working one step at a time toward impossible dreams.
Well, there’s the cast of characters. Other Cobb Hillians live right near by — Phil Rice and Beth Sawin and their daughter Jenna are across the field in the new subdivision. Art and Marie Kirn (fellow opera lovers!) are in the old Curtis house. The community is assembling even before our houses are started. It feels good. I love these people!
As you may have noticed, I go wildly up and down about the struggle to bring Cobb Hill into being. At the moment I’m up. We have 17 (of the eventual 22) households committed or nearly so, and 18 is the number we think will be needed to start construction.
A flurry of final building details are being worked out. (There’s so MUCH that goes into the design of a house!) I cut out little replicas of my furniture and arranged them within the floor plan of my one-room apartment and like what I saw — I can hardly wait to move in! It all feels unstoppable at the moment, though there are huge hurdles ahead. The three critical state permits are still not in hand. (We’re waiting, waiting, waiting.) The cost estimates are painfully high — we could lose the families of nurses and teachers and ministers if we don’t get them down. (The only way we can keep farmers in the picture is to outright subsidize their unit.) We’re talking to banks about a construction loan.
Some of you have asked me how you can help Cobb Hill. Publicizing to help us find that 18th wonderful household (and 19, 20, 21, and 22) would help a lot! And if you have money you would be willing to invest with us for the period of our construction, you could help bring our finance costs down by several thousand dollars per unit. The banks are quoting us exorbitant interest rates plus all kinds of fees. We’d be happy to pay, say 7% interest on loans that would last from six months to two years, starting this spring. The loans would be secured by the growing buildings and paid off as families move in and buy their units. We’ve already raised $1 million in construction loans from our own combined resources and those of friends. We need about $2 million more.
If any of you would be willing to turn a construction loan into a longer-term mortgage loan on the finished units, that would also be wonderful — for mortgages we will need roughly half the construction loan amount. We will pool all mortgage loans together and spread over all mortgaged units, to spread the risk.
If anyone is in a position to make an outright donation (tax deductible) of any amount, it will go, at the specification of the donor, into a) historic restoration of the barns, b) the capital fund for the organic farm or c) bringing down the home purchase price for the families that need it most, a subsidy that will remain with the unit, keeping some of the housing lower cost forever, so the community can always have diverse incomes. The Cobb Hill families have themselves decided to contribute to the affordable housing fund the proceeds from selling our development rights.
Enough appeal. If you’d like to know more, I can send or email you a draft description of the Cobb Hill Fund, and I’m happy to talk.
The term has started and, as always, I dreaded it till it started and now I love it. I love the students, so full of potential and life. I love the subject matter, environmental ethics, Ishmael and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and this year for the first time Alan AtKisson’s Believing Cassandra. I love organizing speakers and readings on population growth and forest management and genetic engineering. I love NOT sharing my own passions on these subjects and helping the students to find their own. I don’t like grading, I don’t like the time lost from the Institute and Cobb Hill and writing.
The Sustainability Institute is humming along with more good ideas and opportunities than we can handle. I’m busy trying to keep the funding stream flowing and to stay on top of all the projects. For Cobb Hill I’m deep into bylaws and conservation easements and affordable housing and the engineering of the energy systems. (All topics about which I am woefully ignorant, but learning fast.)
And then we’re ordering seeds for spring …..
Love,
Dana
