Dear Folks, A light snow is falling.  They’re impeaching the president.  I’m in a foul mood.

They even usurped the Saturday live broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera for their mean-spirited, self-righteous, vindictive nonsense.  So I shut off the Congress and put on my CD of today’s broadcast opera, La Traviata.  It’s a historic recording with Anna Moffo, Richard Tucker and Robert Merrill.  I’m comforting myself with the thought that it’s probably better than the performance in New York that I’m missing.

Time to count my blessings.  That’s always the thing to do when in a foul mood.  Let’s see, blessings, blessings….

The five calves are growing.  Stephen made a picture for you, baby Jerseys lolling around their hay feeder.  They’re all off the bottle now and getting fat.  They will grow up to be the world’s friendliest cows, because they receive Kerry and Stephen’s personal care, plus chin-scratches from the rest of us.  Those big doe eyes are just irresistible.

If you could see a bit to the right of Stephen’s picture, you’d find three big horses, Mari, Cassima, and ol’ Bill.  Since I’m so used to seeing sheep in that barnyard, it’s still a shock to me to look out at the huge horses.

The goose in the picture is the only one left, the gander.  I tried for a month to coax his two wives off the pond, warning them that as soon as the ice was strong enough to hold a coyote, their island refuge would fail them.  They laughed at me.  They avoided me.  They eluded me.  They let me herd them along the road just as far as the brook, and at that point they jumped off the bridge and swam away, honking in derision.  I got so mad at them that I was only slightly horrified on the morning when I went down for yet another try and found just a few scattered feathers.  The gander somehow eluded the coyotes and found his own way up to the barnyard.  He’s so lonely now that he’s befriending the dogs and the calves.  I’ll try to give him away to somebody.  The shutting-down of Foundation Farm continues, driven by the wily coyotes.  I’m not happy about this, but I’m trying to make it a lesson in letting go, in preparation for the farm to come.  I don’t think my farm-mates would have liked me to put geese in the swimming pond over there.

The dogs Emmett and Rudy are fine, rolling in the new snow.  The cats are fine; Jimmy and Latte are sporting red ribbons and bells around their necks for Christmas; Kitty sleeps on my bed at night purring like a damn chain saw; ancient Simon is fading into skin and bones, but of good appetite and good cheer.

The chickens are laying up a storm, about 3 dozen eggs a day.  I sell them at the coop and at our community meetings.  The biddies refuse to go out of the Chicken Palace on snowy days, until I throw the kitchen scraps on the ground outside, at which point they screech and fly to get the scraps, trying somehow not to land on any snow.

Ariane Voigt is here for part of the Christmas holiday — she’s the daughter of my German friend Otfried; she’s here for a year of high school and English practice.  (For those of you with long memories of this newsletter, we have also hosted in the past Ariane’s older sisters Yorinde and Stella.)  We love having Ariane around.  We rope her into Scrabble and Boggle and puzzles.  She ropes us into shopping expeditions.  We love having Jim Hourdequin living here too — he plunges into everything, whether it’s helping Stephen with the horses, or helping Kerry cook, or walking the woods at the new farm with me, trying to figure out how to get some logging done.

Here’s a real blessing!  Kerry had surgery a week ago to remove the steel pins from her legs — it’s been two years since she broke them in an accident with the horses, and this was her fourth and final trip to the hospital.  The pins can come out now because the legs are healed.  Within 3 days of the operation, she was up and cooking; within five days she was back at work at the coop.  She has not a trace of a limp, and now that the pins are out, she’s without pain even when she kneels.  As Stephen says, there was a day and age when that story would not have come out so well.

We have a nice spruce tree up in the living room, cut from our land.  We’re preparing today for a party for Kerry’s friends from work, so wonderful cooky-smells are emerging from the kitchen.  I’ve been playing in handbell concerts all over the valley — we have another one tomorrow at a nursing home.  I’ve graduated to the “grown-up” choir, the experienced ringers, and I find it a challenge to keep up, but I LOVE playing those bells.  I especially love the beautiful Christmas music.  It’s the one thing I do just for pure joy; it’s my most sincere form of worship.

Our hardest piece is the “Trepak,” the Russian dance from the Nutcracker Suite, which goes at a terrific pace and has lots of loud, emphatic notes, which sound terrible when you play them in the wrong place.  That piece has been haunting me, as I practice the hard parts over and over.  The other night Stephen and Kerry and I were out in the yard doing the animal chores, and a lovely snow was falling, and Stephen, in rapture, threw up his hands and started doing a snow dance.  As I joined in, I started singing the “Trepak.”  Kerry got caught up, and of course the two dogs took one look at us and got all excited and starting dancing too — well, anyway, a doggy form of dancing.  The five of us Trepakked all over the yard.  What goofs!  What fun!

There, see, counting your blessings puts you right back in a good mood!  I have so many blessings, if I’d just stop to look.  I’ve been zooming around too much to look.

The rewrite of Beyond the Limits is going very badly.  At the moment I am utterly hopeless about it; there’s so much to do and so little time to work on it.  I called my (wonderful, understanding) editor last week and threw in the towel.  There’s no way I’m going to come close to my deadline.  It feels better to admit that, though it doesn’t solve the problem of how and when I am going to get it done.

The Sustainability Institute commodity studies are going gangbusters.  We’re up to our eyebrows in wood, corn, and shrimp.  Last week Phil Rice was off in Iowa and Minnesota meeting with corn farmers, while Don Seville and Drew Jones were meeting in Concord NH with a pulp mill manager and consulting foresters and ecologists.  Meanwhile our “shrimp team” and I were down at Tufts Veterinary School for a day-long seminar on shrimp aquaculture.  (The situation is worse than I thought, folks.  I don’t know whether to tell you to give up shrimp or to gulp it down while it lasts.)  With the exception of the shrimp industry (as paranoid a group of people as I have ever run into), our study is being received with eagerness.  People know they need a neutral tool to help them understand these important systems, upon which so many peoples’ livelihoods depend, which do so much harm to the environment, which are transforming so fast technologically, which are so unstable economically, which are the source of so much social friction.

The Institute has a logo now.

and we have received a few Christmas gifts, which will help me hire an assistant next year, which I badly need.

Lots of blessings!

I wish I had nothing else to do but Institute work.  And the Cobb Hill community, which is also going gangbusters.  Or going broke.  At this point it’s hard to tell.

Here’s a computer rendition of what the community will look like, if we ever get it built.  On the right is the existing Hunt farmyard, with the barns and the two silos.  On the farthest right is the Hunt house, some day to be the Sustainability Institute office.  The cluster climbing the hill on the left is Cobb Hill.  The common house is closest to the farmyard.  (I will have a small apartment in the common house.)  Rising up around a central green that’s hard to see from this angle are clustered duplexes and single houses.  Twenty-two living units on four acres.  The field stretching off behind the barn is a 15-acre piece of bottom land; it will be the site of Stephen & Kerry’s CSA garden and my 1-acre pick-your-own flower garden.  Beyond that, stretching off to the left in the picture are 250 acres of pastures and woods and fields.

We started drilling a well this week, up on the hill behind the building site.  So far, after $8000 worth of hydrological study, we have one 600-ft deep dry hole.  We’re going to try again at a different site next week.

We’ve been walking the forest with loggers and foresters, trying to decide whether to cut some timber to help build our houses.  It’s been interesting and we’ve learned a lot, but I think we’ve decided not to try to get in a big cut soon enough to have lumber dry and ready for building — though that would be far more sustainable than trucking in lumber from someone else’s forest, especially if we have a careful logger, who will cut in such a way as to release surrounding trees for better growth.  We’ve found such a logger, but we have other hangups.

One of the main ones is cash flow — we don’t have a construction loan yet (and can’t get one till we get our well and our permits), and we have all we can do now to keep our design team and engineers paid — so, though a cut now would probably save us money on construction (and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of wood), we can’t afford it.  An old story, the need for up-front financing standing in the way of sustainability!

Also, maybe more important, we don’t yet have someone in the community who is able to take on responsibility for the forest, as Stephen and Kerry have done for the ag land, as Peter and Don have done for the sugarbush and sugarhouse, as I have done for the Institute.  If we were cutting and milling wood on the land this winter, we’d want one of us overseeing it, to be sure it was done well.  Though several of us would love to do that, no one has enough time.

That’s how unsustainability gets to us — by draining away our time so we can’t do it right, and then offering us the convenience of doing it wrong.  So we will wait and go slower with our forest and try to get our construction lumber from a responsible logger.  We’ll need our own lumber later too, for repairing barns and building workshops and whatever.  We’ll be thinning in that forest for decades.

But I do get so impatient!  I want to do all this cool stuff now!  I want to buy my own portable band saw and learn to use it!  I want to go right out with a Swedish hand-saw and start thinning saplings.

What I have to do instead is start teaching in January.  It feels like walking into prison.  I know it won’t feel like that, when I meet the students and get started.  But every year, before the term starts, I say to myself, with everything else that’s going on, why do you do this?

Because it pays well.  Because the students are so great.

Blessings.

I’d better quit and go clean the house for the party.  Happy holidays to you all, and let’s make a resolution for campaign reform for the New Year!

Love, Dana

P.S.  Starting January 1 I will be switching this newsletter and my column to be activities of the Sustainability Insitute.  So from now on, please write renewal checks to “Sustainability Institute,” not to me.  If you add anything over the $25 renewal fee, you can count it as a charitable deduction to help save the shrimp.  🙂