Dear Folks,

WOW! It’s PLUS FIFTY out! The snow is still piled high, but it’s MELTING! It’s dripping off the roof and trickling down the driveway and sounding like tiny streams running everywhere. The SUN is shining! We in this valley, who can barely remember a day above zero, who automatically pull on three layers before venturing outside, who thought the snow could only pile up higher and higher and never go away, are blinking with astonishment. We’re getting a little giddy.

Yesterday, Saturday, everyone in town used every possible excuse to do something outside. I moved firewood. John managed to get the tractor started (it wisely refuses to turn over when it’s below zero) and moved back some of the biggest snowpiles. He knows, we all know, that the snowiest month of the year is still ahead of us and that we’d better make room for it. We’re telling ourselves, as we soak our faces in the suddenly stronger sunlight, that New England is a cruel trickster. This is just the traditional midwinter thaw that breaks your heart.

I have to be out twice a day in any case, at dawn and dusk to do the chores. (If I don’t shut in the chickens and geese before dark, I leave them vulnerable to raccoons or foxes.) In December that meant at 7:30 AM and 4:30 PM. By now the morning chores have moved a full hour earlier, and the evening ones an hour later.

Here’s my morning routine. Accompanied by two large bouncing dogs, I go out the back door, pull on my barn boots, scoop out wild bird seed from the garbage cans on the back porch, and fill the four feeders. Then the dogs and I skid down the hill, around the corner of the house, and into the basement. I set water running into a 5-gallon plastic jug. While it fills I go to the root cellar and chop up half a bucket of pumpkin or squash or rutabaga for the sheep. (Gives them midwinter vitamins, but the supply is nearly gone now.) I cover the squash in the bucket with scoops of molasses-redolent grain, turn off the water, load the jug and bucket into a little cart, and drag the cart along the ruts I’ve worn in the snow to the barnyard gate. There I fill a black rubber basin with water, to make a little pond for the geese. They could eat snow for water, but geese love to swim, even when it’s 35 below. When it’s that cold I run the water hot, so it will last awhile before it freezes over.

By the time the “pond” is filled, the fat ewe Paprika is pushing at the gate, and the noisy ewe Pansy (whom we call “Foghorn”) is blatting at me. I put the grain bucket up high on the gate, so they can’t get at it, haul the rest of the water in and dump it in the sheep trough, grab the bucket, and push through the milling, enthusiastic, woolly bodies to unhook the barn door. By now the geese inside have heard me coming and are honking their heads off.

A tidal bore of eager sheep sweeps me into the barn, the wave of us nearly knocking the geese over. I try to reach the feeder ahead of the crowd, to get the grain and squash down before big fuzzy heads get in the way. Usually I lose the race.

The grain goes in the feeder, the geese nip at the sheep to make room to crowd in too. I scramble up the steep, cobwebby stairs to the barn loft, haul a bay of hay down from the stack, clip off its twine, and toss compressed plates of June grass down into the hay feeder. At this time of year I cast a worried eye at the diminishing haystack, hoping it will last through lambing and shearing and the regreening of the pasture.

By the time I get back outside, carrying the empty grain bucket and the iced-over water bucket I left for the geese the night before, the geese are out too, swimming in their pond, or, if they’re naughty, in the sheep trough. The dogs and I now have a problem, because we can only go on the narrow path between deep banks of snow, which the geese are blocking. We try to charge through all together, so the geese will nip at me and not at the dogs, but they find the dogs much more satisfying targets.

So we charge. I cart buckets and jug back to the basement and refill them for the chickens, lug them up the hill to the Chicken Palace, carry them up the steps, which I have kept meticulously swept of snow, and open the door to the cackling crowd. I’ve been knocking off young roosters for the stewpot all winter, so there are only two left, a magnificent Partridge Rock, and an even more beautiful, but smaller and therefore picked-on Silver-Threaded Wyandotte. They fill my morning with the sound of their competitive crowing — which is the main thing I keep them for. Now they circle around each other as I throw down feed, the Partridge determined to keep the Wyandotte away from the feeders, the Wyandotte darting in to grab whenever the Partridge looks the other way. I suppose I should do the Wyandotte in, but he’s too pretty. Soon, when the snow melts — well, in a month or so anyway — he can escape his larger nemesis by going outside and flying over the fence, as he did all last summer.

I check the egg box, though there usually aren’t many so early in the morning. Sometimes I get a few, though, still warm, to bring into breakfast. The evening chores are the time to bear the eggs triumphantly back to the house. We’re getting 15-17 a day now from about 25 hens. The number climbs each week as the days lengthen. I sell the eggs to folks at Dartmouth and to the local co-op for $1.25 a dozen. They don’t taste even remotely like supermarket eggs. Everybody around here would rather go without eggs than eat the ones from the supermarket.

If the chicken waterer has frozen up, I haul it back to the basement and carry up a replacement. Now the dogs are bouncing even more, because they know they’re next. We go back into the kitchen, stamping and wheezing if it’s a really cold morning, and I put down breakfast for the dogs and the three cats, who have appeared out of nowhere to rub against my legs.

The whole routine takes about half an hour. I can get impatient with it when it’s a class day and I’m eager to be off to Dartmouth. But when I take the time to be there, to get into Beginner’s Mind, to savor the weather (whatever the weather), to watch the animals and enjoy the sloping view way off to Mt. Ascutney from the height of the Chicken Palace steps, then I love doing the chores. It’s my Zen practice, my time for getting in touch with my land, my commitments, myself.

Meanwhile, indoors, my bedroom has been transformed into a mini-farm, with flats of small green things lining all the south windows. I just now took a break to go hang out there in the sun, and I spotted the first green arches of peppers pushing their way out of the soil! I have three flats of greens (lettuce, spinach, feldsalat, arugula, tatsoi, santoh, dill ) that are just about big enough to start thinning into salads. The petunias, pansies, and stock have sprouted. No sign of life yet from the celery, celeriac, or onions, but the onions I just planted yesterday. In two weeks I’ll start early cabbages and kohlrabi and broccoli, a week after that tomatoes, and by then the snow better be gone so we can put up the outside greenhouse, or there will be no room in my bedroom for me!

Bill Maclay, John, and I have figured out how to enlarge the back house a bit, attach it to the main house, and improve its insulation and windows. John is tearing out the old ceiling and walls, getting ready for the reconstruction. I’ve also started to persuade the town zoning board to allow me to build two more living units, to hold two more families, clustered close to the present house. I envision a big, rough circle of houses and barn, with the main garden and present back yard as a shared center — kind of like a Danish farm with its central courtyard.

The only trouble is, this corner of the land is zoned at 3.5 acres per house. I’ve further complicated the picture by putting conservation easements preventing development on everything but the 5-acre corner where the present buildings are. So I’m trying to convince the town to let me build at extra density in one corner, in exchange for giving up all development on the other 65 acres. That would have been fine — it’s called a PRD (planned residential development) — if I had asked for it before I protected the land. Now I may have protected myself out of expanding my community — we shall see. It could take months to settle the question. In the meantime, when the snow goes off, we’ll start surveying, doing perc tests, and planning just how to build, assuming that we will be permitted to build.

The reason for the problem with the town — the reason for a lot of land use problems — is the quaint American notion of every home an isolated castle, surrounded by its private moat of green grass, under which flows sewage into a septic tank and out into a drainfield. All of Plainfield’s zoning and subdivision regulations are based on this model. The idea of clustered housing, of composting toilets, of joint ownership, of community is alien.

So I may or may not get to house a larger community here. Two families are thinking about coming. They aren’t committed yet, neither am I, neither is the town. But you can see what I’m trying to do. I’m making space for community, as nice as I can, on the principle of If You Build It, They Will Come.

Until I have the space, I won’t advertise for people, though the word is getting around anyway — which is the way Foundation Farm has filled itself in the past. The panic will come with the spring, with much, much more to do than John and I can do, with gardens and lawnmowing and orchard pruning and hay to put up and fences to fix — all delightful activities, unless you have to do them in a panic. So I will have to advertise. So, hmmmmm, I’ve been putting this off (one does get a shy about trotting one’s visions out in public) — I’ll start by practicing on you.

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WANTED

Housemates. Farm-mates. People who are interested in sharing the adventure of living in community. People who would like to work toward a sustainable, productive, healthy way of life on 70 mostly wooded acres in a small New England town with terrible winters, glorious springs, summers, and falls, a view of Mt. Ascutney, and Dartmouth College 20 minutes away. (Longer if the town of Lebanon is stupid enough to allow a Wal-Mart and a Costco to be built on the road in between.)

Singles, couples, or small families welcome. Children welcome. Animals welcome. (We already have a goodly population of dogs, cats, chickens, geese, and sheep. Ducklings have been ordered and will arrive in April.)

No smokers please, no substance abusers, no one whose existence depends on the continuous accompaniment of loud music in shared spaces. We lean toward vegetarianism but are open-minded; applicants need to be at least vegetarian-tolerant.

We offer both private space and shared space, individual cooking and communal cooking. We share the operating expenses and the work of running a small farm; we also share an abundance of organic produce, flowers, beauty, and fun with fuzzy or feathery creatures. If you’re a tinkerer, there are great opportunities for developing renewable energy sources, including solar and hydro.

It costs little in money to live here, but quite a lot in responsibility. We are looking for people who are mature enough to clean up after themselves, put tools away, fix things that get broken, do what they say they’ll do, and complain to the person who can do something about the complaint. We need people who actively like farm work, preferably those who have farming or mechanical skills, though we’re willing to teach you what we know. We offer in return the companionship and partnership of other responsible, industrious people.

Financial arrangements are negotiable. They range from an opportunity to invest in your own living space and co-own the common space, to an opportunity to exchange work for rent. You are not expected to be a full-time farmer (unless you want to be). You are expected to contribute the equivalent of one day a week to the work of the community.

Operating rules are also negotiable. We are open to experiment; we judge the worth of operating rules not by their ideological purity, but by whether they work to the satisfaction of the members of the community.

We have no gurus here, and no single spiritual tradition, but we do our best to lead good lives, for larger purposes than our own comfort, in ways that contribute to the surrounding community and to the world. We try to be kind to the land and to other people, and to build our happiness on love and service, rather than on buying and owning fashionable things. In 22 years, no perfect angels or realized Buddhas have lived here, and so you will need to be able to get along with imperfect angels and as-yet-unrealized Buddhas. If you can love us, and yourself, for the struggle, for being on the path, for making progress, then we will be able to make progress happily together.

* * * * *

How’s that?

I am having a wonderful time Not Traveling, just teaching and writing and farming. I’m trying to get proposals out to expand Balaton. I’m knitting and playing on the piano the hard, gorgeous Brahms cello sonata that Jorinde left with me. I’m saying no to at least three requests a day to go somewhere and give a speech or join a committee or attend a conference. I don’t even stop to think about it, I just say no.

I’m beginning to get just the tiniest glimpse of what life might be like, if I weren’t always pushing myself to do more than I can reasonably do. It’s an amazing sight! Life would be very different! I think it would even be more sustainable!

Love,
Dana