December 26, 1999

Dear Folks,

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” That sentence, which opens Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, always makes me cry, because of its past tense. Had a farm in Africa. The whole book is a hymn of sorrow for that lost farm.

Even when I still owned Foundation Farm and thought I always would, I would cry at the thought of a past farm, a farm into which one poured one’s energy and money and dreams, a farm where every rock and tree was familiar and told a story and brought back memories. So now, by my own choice (as opposed to Isak Dinesen), I have a lost farm too.

It has been a hard month, a time of grieving. Harder than I thought, given that I’ve known for two years that I would sell the farm, that I would go to a better farm, that on the new farm we could build a community far beyond what the old farm could support, that it was the right thing to do, that it was the working out of a dream. Still, it hurt. It still hurts. And, in surprisingly short order we have established a cozy establishment here at the Hunt house, and I’m basically cheerful again.

The chaos of the move continued right up to the last days, when Michael brought the U-Haul and the moving van came for the piano and other heavy stuff. Foundation Farm emptied out, got cleaned up cleaner than it ever was when we lived there, began to echo in a funny, empty way. Emmett and the cats got upset; they’d never seen their familiar indoor territory get completely torn up like that. The dumpster had to be emptied six times. Poor Jim watched his comfortable lifestyle march out the door, leaving him with a stripped place. (I left him the dining room and living room furniture and several woodstoves and the beds upstairs and some pots and pans and Emmett and Kitty — none of which we could have fit into the Hunt house.)

For awhile we left him the chicken house and the chickens too, because the new chicken house wasn’t ready here in Hartland. For a week I drove home past Foundation Farm every night to pick up the eggs and shut in the chickens — Jim let them out in the morning. It was good to go back there, to be welcomed by a bouncing Emmett, to care for the biddies in that grand chicken palace. Kind of eased the transition.

Meanwhile a Hartland carpenter, Rick Cutts, was building a chickenmobile for us, planned by Michael. I would have been happy to create an exact replica of the Foundation Farm chicken palace, but I couldn’t get anyone to agree where it should be put, and I couldn’t see the right place for it either. Michael got the brilliant idea of putting it on wheels. He found an old trailer, Rick put new tires on it, and they built up from there. It looks like a gypsy wagon. I’m sure all the Hartland neighbors drove by wondering what on earth is that?

Finally it was ready, and Michael, Libby and I took the Dodge truck over to Plainfield one night for the Great Chicken Move. We have more than 60 chickens; this was not a minor operation. We rounded up every cage we could find, plus big cardboard boxes. I felt around on the roosts in the dark house and picked up chickens, as gently as I could so they wouldn’t screech and upset the others. I passed them out to Libby, who passed them to Michael, who packed them in the cages and boxes in the truck. For the last few I had to turn on the lights and do a frenzied chicken chase. Emmett caught the very last one, which escaped under the chicken house in the dark; the last chicken he’ll get to catch.

Well, they all arrived across the river safely, and they seem to like their gypsy caravan. It’s smaller than the Plainfield palace, and I don’t know where we’re going to put the young ones next spring — in the barn somewhere, I guess. But for now they’re content and laying again, and Michael and Amanda have pretty much taken over the chicken operation.

Imagine! I have no animals to take care of! Slowly they’ve gone out of my life, the sheep, the geese, the chickens, Basil and Emmett, Simon and Kitty. Not what I had planned, but apparently what the universe intends. Of course I still live on a farm with seven cows, three horses, 63 chickens, two dogs and three cats, and I get to be backup caretaker. (Yesterday, Christmas Day, I got to tend to them all!) It will be interesting to see whether the universe plans to bring animals back into my life again, or whether something else is intended for me.

If we had fun moving chickens, you can imagine what fun Stephen and Kerry had moving horses and cows (and jumpy little calves). All arrived safely, however, and you should see how nice it looks, when the horses go galloping around the lower pasture, and when the cows are all lined up at the concrete feed trough in the barnyard. These old barns have been animal-less for years; they must be happy to have life back in them again.

We still have a few last big things to move over at Foundation Farm, and in the spring I’ll go back and dig up some herbs and things (and take the new owner Susan on a garden tour, but basically we’re done over there now. December 1 was the closing, the hardest moment for me, the legal completion, the irreversible transition. Dennis wasn’t there, thank heaven; he sent his lawyer. I cried most of the day.

I was so focused on getting everything done at Foundation Farm that I kind of forgot we had to reverse the whole process and unpack everything at the Hunt house. I’d allocated a month to moving out — I should have allocated another to moving in. The Hunt house is so much smaller than Foundation Farm that, by the night of December 1, when everything had been unloaded, even the piano, there was hardly space to move. The garage was full, the house was full, the barns were full. We couldn’t find the tea. We couldn’t find the vacuum cleaner bags. We couldn’t find the phone book. Furthermore, we had just dropped this mess onto poor Marsha Carmichael, who had been living in the Hunt house in solitary splendor for two months, and who probably couldn’t believe how much junk her new housemates had. (She didn’t see how much we threw out, but having just moved from her own farm in Michigan, she had a good idea. She has been such a trouper throughout all these transitions.)

Well, now it’s almost a month later, we know where the tea and vacuum cleaner bags and telephone book are, and the place is functional and livable. It isn’t beautiful — it’s a beat-up old farmhouse. It isn’t convenient — the kitchen is cramped and badly laid out and hard even for one person to cook in, much less several at once. It isn’t spacious — we’re living on top of each other much more than we did at Foundation Farm and are having to be much more conscious of each others’ needs, wants, opinions, feelings about pets and preferences in music. It’s an energy-efficiency nightmare. When the wind blows the curtains move. The walls are uninsulated and cold. The water is electrically heated. There’s a forced-hot-air heating system with a clunky furnace that gulps down #2 heating oil. There isn’t a compact fluorescent bulb in the place, except in a few lamps we moved in. The main chimney is unusable until we get it relined and the fireplace has no damper. The wiring is dicey. The basement has a dirt floor and smells moldy. I had to scrape Denver Bronco stickers off my bedroom window.

AND, it’s sounder than Foundation Farm was when we moved in there. It’s more house than most people in the world could ever dream of. The baby grand Steinway fits fine in the living room and has been tuned, and Marsha covered its top with the dozens of neat rhythm instruments she has, and she and I play Bach flute-piano duets, and Libby will start taking piano lessons soon from a Hartland neighbor. Good meals and fresh-baked bread now flow regularly from the inconvenient kitchen. Marsha has been building bookcases galore, which I fill up with the speed of light, so there aren’t more than a dozen or so unpacked book boxes left in the basement. We’ll get our fax and Internet connection set up tomorrow.

I’m sitting in my new office, which I share with Marsha. It looks out to the south. In the foreground is a weedpatch which next spring I will turn into a beautiful garden, and to the right is Roger Hunt’s trailer (he has a lifetime tenancy; we like him and are glad to have him around to supply the living memory of this farm). In the background is the small VTel building and the village of Four Corners, topped by the fine white steeple of the Unitarian church a block away. I walked there for the Christmas Eve candlelight service, which was sweet. I already know half the people there, and I was happy to think of them as neighbors. Our neighbors! In Hartland, Vermont! We’re VERMONTERS!

I was really down for a week, resenting this old house for not being my other old house, feeling bereft and homeless, wondering what on earth I’d done and why I’d done it. Then I finally dragged myself out of the house on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, much warmer than any day in December ought to be. I walked up Cobb Hill, past where the new houses will be, past the high pasture, into the woods, farther than I had ever gone before. I discovered that this east-tilting farm does have a western exposure, over the high ridge. I discovered some magical places, places for a retreat hut someday, or for the Cobb Hill children to have a hideout. I scared up a grouse. I stumbled upon the orange markers where the new snowmobile trail will go and followed them — it will be a beautiful trail. (After long negotiations with the snowmobile club, we moved the trail to the back of the hill, where we won’t see or hear it. We loathe snowmobiles, but like our neighbors, so this was the compromise. There are also ski trails all over our woods.) I wound back around to the rise above the house sites, coming out just as the sun was setting, and looked down on the farmstead. Then I remembered why I had done this crazy thing. I haven’t yet sunk roots into this land, but this is the land that called me.

I’ve ordered 10 different varieties of lilac to plant this spring. And a few dozen lilies to sink into the perennial bed I started from divisions from Foundation Farm. And lily of the valley and peonies. And asparagus and strawberries and raspberries. I’ve already planted 14 apples and 2 pears, and I’ve got the catalog out to order more. I met with a neighbor this morning to discuss a screening row of pine and spruce and fir to plant along the border between our new houses and his.

By the time that’s all done, I will have sunk in roots!

So, it’s the day after Christmas, the third day of my annual fast. Kerry’s in the kitchen baking bread, Stephen’s in the dining room sketching the farmyard for this letter. Marsha will be home tonight after visiting her mother in New York. Amanda, Michael and Libby are visiting relatives in Buffalo and will be back later this week. Amanda has just announced to us that she’s pregnant; Libby will have a brother or sister next August. Whether that means they will go on living here and farming with Stephen and Kerry, none of us knows right now, including, I expect, Michael and Amanda.

Libby had a messy, wonderful cooky-decorating party here with some of her new Hartland friends. She and I took a plateful to Roger in the trailer. Mitch Hunt, the son of the former owner, popped in one morning for a chat — he and Stephen got off on how to build your own milk pasteurizer. We went to a Christmas potluck at another good neighbor’s — lot of nice folks in this town. Chrissie and Scot treated me to a performance of the Christmas Revels, and two-month-old Hallie Grace came too and was completely good and I got to hold her a lot. Michael, Amanda, Libby and I went to the Christmas concert of my old bell choir back in Plainfield. I miss it. Maybe when my life settles down I’ll rejoin it.

Cobb Hill Cohousing struggles along. It has felt like a struggle lately, because the latest cost estimate went up again, drastically, to our collective horror. We’re now paring back our preferences to make the place affordable even to middle-class folks. Standing seam roofs and hardwood floors may be out, at least for some of us. Some may move in with unfinished interiors and complete the work themselves. Solar hot water looks out of the question for the moment, though we’ll plumb for it so it might be added some day.

These are the sorts of difficulties that bring cohousing groups down, and for awhile I feared for this one, mainly because it’s getting to the point where dear and central people are wondering whether they can afford it. It breaks my heart and puzzles my mind, because I can’t explain why everything is turning out so expensive. The plan hasn’t changed, the houses are small, the roads and water and wastewater systems and even the furnaces are shared. The costing is getting more realistic; it’s now being done by the contractors who will actually build the place, and we’re moving toward a fixed-price contract, so they’re surely high-balling it. And the central green options are still in there — extra insulation, extra good windows, composting toilets. But still! We’re talking $185,000 for a two-bedroom duplex, if we make some deep cuts.

The good news is that the group is holding together, agonizing together, being creative. We decided not to split the common costs evenly, so some units will go down in price (while others go up — this was a big and generous decision). We decided that if we can sell our development rights to the state, we’ll apply all that money to subsidizing house cost for those who most need it. We’re scratching around looking for other subsidies to allow our farmers and ministers and teachers to stay with us. I’m working hard on developing our own mortgage fund, so we can knock a percent or two off some of the mortgages. The discussions about all these things have been hard, hard, hard, but civilized and good-hearted and determined and brave. I can hardly wait to be actually living together with all these people. I’m delighted to be already living with some of them and very near others, as we begin to converge on Hartland.

I need especially to say a good word for my housemates, Stephen, Kerry, Marsha, Michael, Amanda, Libby. This move has been a huge strain on everyone. Every one has worked hard and put up with dust, mess, chaos, and heavy lifting, not to mention the emotional trauma of moving, and then finding yourself in tight quarters. The patience and considerateness of these folks under these conditions is amazing. We don’t have to wait for Cobb Hill, we’re practicing community right now, confronting difficulties together, everyone pitching in. It makes me think that our common dreams are really possible — and that we’re already living them.

Love,

Dana

One more time: Our new address is PO Box 174 (13 Mace Hill Road for deliveries), Hartland Four Corners VT 05049. Our phone is 802-436-1355. Stephen and Kerry’s farm phone is 802-436-1448. As of tomorrow our home fax will be 802-436-1584.