Dear Folks,
It’s Sunday afternoon about 4 and the sun is just setting — a short, bitter-cold November day. It was nearly zero last night (-10 centigrade, for my European readers). We have had three heavy snows already, but today there’s only a light dusting of white on the ground. I went out yesterday to pull some of the last leeks and Brussels sprouts from the garden and they were frozen stiff.
Two weeks ago the pond skimmed over with ice for the first time, and Suzanne and I went down to the pasture to catch the duck and bring her up to the barn for the winter. She’s the only duck out of eleven to have escaped the slow, steady depredations of the fox (driving in late at night we have actually seen the fox, but mostly we just find one less duck and a small pile of feathers), and she has grown wily and hard to catch. We lured her into the sheep shed with some grain and had a short, wild session until she finally got so panicked she flew right into Suzanne’s arms. Now she’s happily at home in the stall here at Whybrow’s with my two yearling ewes Aida and Pamina. They all knew each other down in the pasture, now they’re cozily spending the winter together.
The six brothers of Aida and Pamina were taken to the butcher last week. They were a handsome lot and will make fine lambchops for our customers. I also had quite a time catching them — they too had grown wild in the freedom of the pasture, and their father, Caspar Weinburger, was doing his best to knock me over, while I was doing my best to get them all into the shed. Finally we loaded the young ones in the truck, Dennis drove them off to Sharon Beef, and Caspar and I headed up the road to his winter quarters in the barn, where his harem was waiting. It was a dicey walk at first, because he had completely flattened my metal grain bucket (by slamming into it head down at a full run from 100 feet away — rams are such subtle creatures), so I had nothing to induce him with. But he stayed with me, only occasionally trying to run me over, until, about halfway up Daniels Road, he got a good whiff of the ewes. At that point I had to run full out to keep up with him. I let him into the pen, and within five minutes he had started off the first lambs that will be born next spring.
Death and life on the farm, never far apart!
Kate and Helen are both home from college this weekend, which fills the house with life and projects. They’re both good cooks and they have produced a steady stream of muffins and bread and apple cobbler. Kate got out her herd of toy Holstein cows and her paints and went to work painting them with the exact markings of champions. Every member of this herd has its name etched on its underside. Some day Kate will replace each toy cow with a real one. Already, as a junior in college, she’s beginning to think about selecting her breeder herd and getting them to work producing heifers.
Both girls brought home piles of books and spent most of their time studying. I felt like dropping all my work and studying right along with them, the books looked so interesting. Kate has a beautiful geology text and a lot of great books on Taoism and Buddhism. Helen is reading Dostoyevski and a bunch of Supreme Court cases on the rights of women and gays (quite an accompaniment to Dostoyevski!). Made me remember what a great time college is, when you get to learn so many new and wonderful things, and when you can feel virtuous instead of lazy for reading all day.
I have been working hard on expanding the market for my column. I sent out samples to 25 new papers, mostly in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and to 14 old papers that had turned me down the first time. Now I’m calling them, one by one, and talking to their editors. So far I think I have two takers. And Marianna Grossman, one of the dear folks who read this newsletter, managed to sell her paper in Columbus, Indiana, on the column. They just took the first one a few weeks ago. I’m also on the trail of the San Jose CA Mercury News, thanks to another reader, Bill Reckmeyer. Paper by paper it adds up. “The Global Citizen” is now going out regularly to 22 papers, and in October the column brought in more than $1000 (gross) for the first month ever. The Philadelpia Inquirer just took another piece (the one on Kondratief and Forrester included here), and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is probably going to run my September series on incinerators.
As you will see from this month’s columns, the stock market crash shook me up greatly, primarily because I had been expecting it for so long and then had too much to say about it when it happened. As you will see, I think it’s a symptom of a long, slow economic upheaval that will affect all of us. What I really need to do is put everything into one long article; this is too important a story to do in 800-word blurbs. But I have such a huge backlog of writing to do (I always have a huge backlog of writing) that I don’t see when I’ll get around to it.
I’m just back from a short visit to Arkansas, where I was called to Meadowcreek (I’ve written about that place before — it’s an environmental education center in the Ozarks where students can both read about and practice directly solar architecture, organic farming, and other practices of a sustainable lifestyle). There was a meeting there of eminent ethicists and philosophers, called by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, to draft a ringing global statement about environmental ethics for the World Conservation Strategy. I think I was there because I’m a friend of Meadowcreek — certainly not because of my theological expertise!
I enjoyed the meeting thoroughly; I liked every participant very much; they were gentle, thoughtful, dedicated people. But they were, every one but me, white, male, American or British, and Christian — why was THIS group drafting a global ethical statement? Several of them were also long-winded and esoteric and theoretical — preachers. The meeting was a disaster as far as drafting a simple, clear statement of ethics was concerned. But I had a great time, learned a lot, walked in the woods, saw a pileated woodpecker, and got to spend a few days afterward with dear friends and relations in Harrison, Arkansas. And it was a lot WARMER down there than it is at home.
We’re gearing up for a big Thanksgiving. Ever since I moved to the farm, Thanksgiving has been a more meaningful celebration for me than Christmas. Old friends and former denizens of the farm come back, our feast is fashioned almost entirely from food we’ve grown ourselves, and thankfulness for the harvest and the goodness of the earth is just what I’m feeling at this time of year. This year Andrea and her fiance Bill will be coming, and Jozsef from Hungary and Narayana from India. Ruth is cooking the turkey and cranberry, Helen and Kate are making the pies. I’ll go next door to Foundation Farm that morning to help Suzanne and Dennis and Richard prepare their part of the feast. Richard has volunteered to make shrimp cocktail, Suzanne and I will concentrate on veggies — corn pie and Brussels sprouts and braised leeks and mashed squash with maple syrup and baked potatoes, all from the garden or freezer or root cellar.
A large contingent from both farms, include Basil the jogging dog, will be running in the 6-mile Plainfield Turkey Trot in the morning. After dinner we’ll all go out for a long walk in the woods in the crisp November twilight. And then we’ll come in and sit by the fire and have dessert and think of all we have to be thankful for.
Love, Dana
