Dear Folks,

The calm before the storm.  I leave on Wednesday for Budapest and the Balaton meeting — always the high point and most exhausting week of my year — a week when I’m with 50 of my closest partners and best friends from around the world and it seems a shame to waste time sleeping — a 50-ring circus of sustainability talk and computer demonstrations and project meetings and personal catching-up — a combination of first-rate intellectual analysis, shared political goals, songs, and hugs that gives me enough new ideas and psychic energy to propel me for the rest of the year.

We spend mornings in plenary session, listening to speakers and discussing a topic that we all want to learn more about.  This year the topic, by the choice of the group, is “money flows” — international trade and finance and how they affect the poor and the environment.  Is NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) a good idea?  Should it be expanded to all Latin America?  Is the Maastricht agreement that will bind Europe together into a common currency a step toward peace and unity, or a step toward handing national sovereignty over to the multinational corporations?  Given that capital is flowing all over the world, how can we get it to flow to the places that need it most?

This is a tough topic for us, since most of us are ecologists or foresters or agronomists or engineers, not economists, and even economists find it hard to comprehend the international financial system as a whole.  I’ve been doing homework all year trying just to master the vocabulary (GATT, structural adjustment, side agreements, comparative advantage, current accounts balance — and those are the easy ones!).  Liz Krahmer, once a Dartmouth student, now an investment banker, has been helping me write a little “primer” for the meeting, defining terms and trying to describe the world as seen through the mind of a financier.  It’s tough going for me, but Liz is patient, and we’re nearly done with a draft primer — which will probably have to be reworked given what we will learn at the meeting.  Getting that primer done has been just one of my preoccupations in preparation for leaving.

The other, of course, has been coping with the harvest.  The Balaton meeting always comes at the time of year, when the vegetables are marching up the hill into the kitchen by the bushelful, demanding to be eaten, frozen, canned, pickled, or prepared for the root cellar.

Yesterday was one of New England’s finest — brilliantly clear, cool, and breezy, the first day with a hint of fall, the first day in a long time when we could work outside without being drenched in sweat.  The birdsongs have mostly quieted now; the dominant sound is the buzzing of crickets and cicadas.  The roadsides are swathed in blooming goldenrod, the apples and pears are dangling heavily from the trees, the squash vines are taking over the world, and the cucumbers are ripening and ripening and ripening.  Fortunately Jorinde is here — the 16-year-old daughter of my friend Otfried Voigt from Germany.  She’s spending 3 months with us, to everyone’s joy.  She’s a bosom buddy for Brenna, and a welcome musical companion for me — she’s a super cellist, so we’re working on Bach and Brahms and Haydn together.  And she’s willing to help in the garden!

Yesterday Jorinde and I picked and washed and blanched and froze all sorts of things.  I lost count, but I think we put away about 5 quarts of green beans, 5 of sweet corn, and 3 of green soybeans.  Plus we hung the yellow onions in sacks in the root cellar and brought the red and the white onions up to dry in the greenhouse.  Plus I had time to discipline the black raspberries (which had been totally out of control) and to plant out some fancy new irises I bought from White Flower Farm and to start some fall lettuce in the greenhouse.

I’ve never counted how many different things I plant, but judging from the box of seed packets it must be around 100 (counting flowers).  Every year I have a few failures and some crops that go gangbusters.  The funny thing is, it’s never the same crops that do either.  Last year my soybeans germinated terribly and I hardly got any; this year I don’t know how I’m going to find time to freeze them all.  Last year I had every sort of problem with the winter squash — cucumber beetles, squash bugs, wilt.  This year the squash are perfect, five kinds of them (Ponca, Sweet Mama, Kindred, New England Pie Pumpkin, Triple Treat Pumpkin), plus the ones that sprouted spontaneously from the compost pile.  I’m going to be giving away squash all over town.  Usually I’m canning tomatoes constantly from mid-August through October.  This year, for the second time in 21 years, they’ve been hit by fusarium, and I haven’t put up a single jar. They’re coming in at just the rate the family can eat them, but no excess.  The raccoons have gotten about half the corn.  The slugs are eating up my fall plantings of greens (that never happened before).

You just never know!  The garden is different every year!

There’s kind of inner turmoil as I work on the farm these days, because I know Sylvia and Don and Heather will be leaving in the fall, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Their leaving is something to be celebrated, because they’re moving to a house of their own, in Vermont, near Sylvia’s sister Binky, about a half-hour drive from here.  That will let Heather spend more time with her two little cousins, and let Sylvia and Binky not only see more of each other, but help each other out with childcare and work on Binky’s farm.  But they will leave a huge hole here.

When they first told me they were moving, I felt just sick.  No little Heather around here, the blithe spirit dancing in the sunlight on the back lawn?  I’ve watched her grow up from age 1 to age 6, and I don’t want to miss any detail of what will happen next.  No more passionate political discussions with Sylvia over the kitchen sink?  No more watching Don’s face light up when he tells his hunting stories?  No more funny tales about what the chickens are up to, while we sit around feasting on ripe tomatoes and sweet corn?  How can Sylvia write her books about someone else’s farm animals?

That was my first reaction, just sadness and pain.  My second reaction was panic.  How the heck am I going to manage this farm without Don’s strong back to throw the sheep and heave the haybales up to the barn loft? — or Don’s eagle eye to shoot a raccoon that’s climbing into the chicken house?  How can I get through a lambing without Sylvia’s natural way with animals?  Where will I find the time, much less the strength, to do the mowing and cleaning and woodcutting and snow shoveling they have been doing?  I suddenly saw the fragility of my whole arrangement here, how much it depends upon just a few people with some pretty weird skills, who are not easy to replace.  Short of tripling myself, what on earth am I going to do?

I have to admit a third reaction that came a few days later.  No one who has ever lived here has been an angel, and that includes the Spains.  It will be nice, it suddenly occurred to me, not to have to trail around after them putting away tools.  It will be nice not to have the general wear and tear that any small child inflicts on a household.  It will be OK with me to have two fewer cats (five is really a bit much) and not to find maggoty deer hooves on the porch.  Because I will have to take over the animal care again, I will have to stop traveling — the more I think about that, the better it sounds.

Those are just first reactions, none of them dominant in my mind for very long.  One thing is sure — in 21 years of living here, with well over 50 different people, the benefits the non-angels bring always outweigh their faults.  What I really like is to have this big old ungainly house filled with life.  I like to come home at night to find Brenna and Jorinde bending over the sewing machine making a pink-flowered backpack, and Sylvia and Don grilling hamburgers in the back yard, and John pounding on something down in the basement workshop, and Heather bouncing up and down to show me her new school dresses.  That’s the kind of activity this house should shelter!

Dennis and I used to be picky about who would live here, but since I’ve had the place myself, my policy has been “whomever God sends.”  (That turned out to be the actual policy when Dennis was here too, of course.)   I don’t know what my policy is going to be now.  I’m praying for a miracle or at least for some clear guidance.  The farm is run down in many ways, especially the fences and the furniture and the little house where the Spains have been living.  We’ve just put a new roof on the barn and we’re about to refinish the kitchen floor, and Don has been scraping and spraying the house to get it ready for painting, but there’s a lot more maintenance that needs doing.  One idea I have is to keep the little house empty over the winter and spring, long enough to do some major renovations.  I could fix up some things in the big house too.  Then, when I get everything spruced up, I’ll either have a nicer place to offer new residents, or I can sell the whole darn spread.

Selling the farm enters my mind every time there’s a crisis like this.  It’s a big distraction from my writing and my international work, and a financial responsibility that I can’t handle by myself.  Whenever I go visit friends who live alone in neat little condominiums, I feel a pang of envy at the simplicity of their lives.  And I couldn’t stand to own this place and do a worse job than I do now at keeping it up — I couldn’t, for example, sell the sheep and watch the pastures grow up in brush, or cut down the orchards, or, God forbid, let even a square foot of the gardens go back to nature.  Better to sell the kit and kaboodle to someone who can handle it than to let it run down.

That’s what I was thinking until yesterday in the garden, planting the irises and planning how to propagate them into an iris empire.  It was suddenly absolutely unthinkable that I wouldn’t be able to watch those irises bloom for years to come.  I’ve ordered several hundred more daffodil and tulip bulbs to plant this fall — how could I miss the spring here?  How could I go without the smell of new lambs or the peeps of baby chicks?  How could I miss nights like the one two weeks ago when Jorinde and I went down to the pasture, where the view of the sky is best, laid down right on Daniels Road (where no cars pass after 10 pm), each of us using a dog for a pillow, and watched the spectacle of the Perseid meteors?  Sell this place?  Ha!  I want to die here and let my body fertilize a nice apple tree.

So — we have had 21 years of transitions around here, and another one is coming.  Each is a good opportunity to rethink the vision and try to manifest it better.  My vision for this place has never changed — I want it to be a loving, helping community that takes good care of its people and its land, and that is an ongoing exploration of the art of sustainable living.  We’ve actually done pretty well at that — though right now it looks impossible to keep it going, much less make it better.  I’m willing to pursue the vision elsewhere, if necessary — as long as it’s a place with apple trees and spring bulbs.  I’m also willing to go on pursuing it here.

So I’m praying for a miracle, or some clear guidance.

Love,

Dana