Dear Folks,
Sunday morning, gray sky, gentle breeze, preparing for a rain. Another rain. It’s like a tropical rainforest around here this summer. Inside and outside things droop and sweat and mold. Outside the vegetation is so thick it’s almost overbearing. Squash vines with leaves the size of umbrellas are traveling over the garden, over the lawn, taking over the world. The pole beans are climbing to the sky.
The house is quiet this morning. John has gone to the beach for a week, Brenna’s staying with her mother and only comes here in sporadic fits to pack up for college. The dogs are spread out on the cool floor snoring. The cats are living off the land. The only sound I can hear at the moment is the chirping of cicadas and crickets and whatever else makes up the dry insect chorus of August.
Alicia’s off hiking for the weekend. Alicia Korten is staying here for a month. She’s the daughter of friends Fran and David Korten (whom a surprising number of readers of this newsletter know). Alicia is a talented, earnest, gracious young woman who works with the indigenous people of Panama, trying to stop the continuation of the Pan-American highway through their territory. She’s back in the States for awhile, writing about her experiences in Central America and raising money and regrouping for her return. Our deal is that she spends half time on her writing and half time helping on the farm, in exchange for room and board. I think we’re getting more than our part of the bargain. Farming is a new and curious thing to Alicia. She’s already taken over the evening animal chores (she likes the chickens), and she helps with the garden and especially with the construction at the back house.
In addition to Alicia we have three part-time carpenters out there now, John and two friends. Two of the three usually manage to show up on any given day. (They all have other jobs.) They keep Alicia busy pulling off old cedar shakes and reclaiming nails and such. John is fanatic about reusing materials and keeping construction debris to a minimum. I’m just happy to see the project moving at a visible pace.
The two-room little house — where Don and Sylvia and Heather lived for 5 years — was built, according to village legend, by Mrs. Davidge-Taylor for her Swedish maid. When we pulled the shakes off, we discovered the date, penciled on the sheathing in elegant turn-of-the-century penmanship. “W.B. Tracy, June 8, 1912.” Years ago we insulated the little house and put a woodstove in and connected it to the main house (about four steps away) by a deck. But it was minimal living space, and so when the Spains moved out I wanted to improve it before anyone else moved in.
Now it’s connected to the main house under a roof, which is all finished and shingled. It took some real figuring to know how to make that connection, given the crazy rooflines of this typical sprawled-out, added-to New England farmhouse. “Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn,” is the name of a great book I have about the evolution of New England houses — and ours fits the picture perfectly, except that we haven’t yet added on enough stuff to connect all the way to the barn.
John figured out how to do the connection, brilliantly, I think. He spent most of the summer dealing with drainage — how to channel pouring Nor’Easters as they run down the east slope into the house, and as they run off the various roofs in impressive Niagaras. We’ve had a bulldozer in here re-countouring the slopes, and we’ve got new rock-filled ditches around and in one place even under the house. So far, in this rainy summer, the drainage is working great, even in the tail-end of hurricane Beryl that dumped two inches here last week. But of course the proof of any drainage scheme around here comes in March, when the whole winter’s snowfall runs off.
The connection from the little house to the big one is now a hallway, with a new back entrance that has a small mudroom for coats and boots. (The big house has a big mudroom in front. Mudrooms are essential in New England!) The little house will be expanded by a walk-in closet and a new bay window, into which a bed can fit. The bathroom that now opens off the kitchen will be enlarged and will open off the connecting hall. Doors and windows will all get moved around and replaced. The whole thing will get plumbed into the hot water system of our wood-fired furnace.
All these changes are framed up now, but there’s an enormous amount of work remaining. And a new couple moves to the farm in three weeks.
Well, says John, there will just be a CRUNCH for a little while. So next month I’ll be writing you from the middle of the crunch.
This is the quiet before the storm for that reason, and also because it’s the week before Balaton, the annual meeting in Hungary of the global systems/sustainability network with which I work. Long-time readers of this newsletter know that the Balaton meeting is the high point of my year. August is always a month of organizing, making final contact with speakers, drawing up a schedule, fundraising, figuring out what to do when 47 people need to ride on a bus that holds 44, and so on. By now, with just a week to go, most of that stuff is as fixed as it’s ever going to be, and so I try to keep the week clear and clean and quiet, in preparation for the wonderful intensity of being with so many of my favorite people from around the world.
Of course I mean “clear and quiet” in relative terms. I have to get two columns ahead (when I’m usually scrambling to produce one a week). I have to assemble all the stuff to take to Balaton, ranging from funny gifts to a VCR that plays both PAL and NTSC. I’m making a presentation there, which I have to prepare for. (This is just about the only group in the world for which I would actually PREPARE a presentation.) I have to read 66 National Geographic proposals. I have to get the rams separated from the ewes, the fall greens planted, the last of the cockerels knocked off and tucked into the freezer.
And so forth. What I mainly have to do is do all that very calmly. If I can find the time, I’d like to take a day or two just to go off, meditate, and think through my priorities. The MacArthur fellowship has hit me with a sense of opportunity and seriousness and finiteness. It’s made me look five years ahead and realize that whatever I want to do, now’s the time to do it. Do I want to keep writing the column if no big syndicate is ever going to take it? Should I push one more time on the syndicates? Is there something better I could be writing? Do I want to go on just being a writer and farmer, or should I see myself as bigger and more important than that, someone who should be joining an ongoing place like Rocky Mountain Institute or World Resources Institute — or found an institute of my own? Does it makes sense for me to spend so much time canning tomatoes and pulling weeds and stuffing envelopes (to you)? Should I be getting more help, not to help Balaton (which I’m doing), but right here to help me?
Funny, I thought I had that all worked out. I was happy being semi-syndicated and working on my textbook and pottering in the garden. It took awhile to get my life structured so I could do just that. Now I have to think again.
Well, it’s good to have to review the basics now and then. If I don’t get the quiet time before Balaton, I’ll do it afterward for sure.
Meanwhile, the garden is disgusting. I can hardly stand to go out there, because all I see is slug damage. Just to make the picture perfect, verticillium or some other wilt is suddenly dissolving away the tomatoes, which up to now had been one of the few crops that the slugs weren’t interested in. I’m used to absolute glory in the garden this time of year, a knockout display of the virtue and workability of organic gardening — and suddenly I see failure on all sides. Alicia and Liz and I scraped away the mulch from the finished crops (peas, onions, beans), tilled those strips, and scattered fall cover crop seeds in them (annual ryegrass, hairy vetch, buckwheat). That’s coming up now, so there are sweet patches of young green. The squash, corn, sunflowers, cosmos, pole beans, are so far untouched by any blight and are looking great. It’s probably only my eye, which knows what the garden should look like in August, that finds the scene disturbing.
And, after that complaint, I have to admit that we’re eating well! Piles of emerald Swiss chard, stir-fried with ginger and garlic and topped with chunks of broiled tofu. Golden soup made from yellow squash, carrots, onions, and turmeric. Cucumber and tomato salads with fresh fennel. Spaghetti with pesto made from fresh-picked basil. New potatoes. Outrageous sweet corn. Yesterday Liz Krahmer and I put away 5 quarts of tomatoes, 4 quarts of pole beans, and 7 quarts of green soybeans. Until the tomatoes die off completely, there will be some to can — it’s just that they won’t last all through September as they should.
I guess maybe the lesson from organic gardening is that even when some things go wrong, there’s always an abundance of other things.
The wild birds seem to having a wonderful year. There are baby phoebes all over the place, teetering on fence wires and the branches of apple trees. Iridescent green hummingbirds fight over the patches of red beebalm and white Dutch runner blossoms. Every morning when I go out to feed the chickens, I see an indigo bunting pipping at me while he flits from one corn plant tassle to another. I wouldn’t have guessed that a corn plant tassle could hold up even a small bird, but this beautiful blue one perches on them quite happily. There was a flicker on the locust trees yesterday. The robins are stuffing themselves with honeysuckle berries, stoking up for the long journey ahead. The sounds are completely different from the spring — calls instead of songs — so I have to be aware in a different way in order to spot these lovely neighbors of mine. But they’re still around, with their young ones.
Down at the pond the Khaki Campbell ducklings are growing up and the drakes are taking on their mature markings, which turn out to be beautiful — dark green heads, dark brown and white tails. I have 3 drakes and 4 ducks, I now know. I haven’t sexed the gray Toulouse geese yet — they can’t be told apart except by turning them upside down and invading their privacy. But I’d guess from their behavior that they’re 2 ganders and 2 geese.
I hardly see the sheep any more, unless I take some grain down to the pasture. They don’t need grain at this time of year, but I take them some occasionally, just to keep them coming to me, for the times when I need to do something to them — like next weekend, when I have to take Wally and his son away from the girls, so they won’t make babies too soon. I haven’t figured out yet how to do that without Don’s help. (Wally weighs 300 pounds and has a mind of his own.) Maybe I’ll just call Don. It will be good when the new folks get here, and I can assemble a sheep-moving team from our own resources.
That will be soon!
Love,
Dana
