Dear Folks, The sun is shining bright and the snow is melting.  Morning chores have shifted an hour earlier, and evening chores an hour later.  In the windows flats are sprouting leeks and celeriac and pansies, and in the barnyard there are lambs — yes lambs!

Yesterday was what I would call a Perfect Saturday.  Having felt overburdened for weeks (more on that later — I don’t feel like complaining at the moment), I decided to spend a whole day just putzing around, doing what I felt like, no pressure or to-dos.  Just a day to enjoy my farm.

I think I actually get more done when I go at the day like that.

I ambled through the morning chores, stopping to play with the dogs and watch the sheep and annoy the annoyed gander back.  (He’s always annoyed — it’s his nature.)  Then I went inside and kneaded up some sourdough rye bread, set it to rise, had breakfast.  Loaded the recycling into the car in a leisurely fashion and drove off to the recycling center and to pick up the mail (which we do at the post office in town), stopping in both places to chat with the neighbors.  You can learn a lot about a town on a Saturday morning at the recycling center or the P.O.

Came back, talked with Kerry’s mom and sisters, who have been visiting for a week, opened the mail, balanced my checkbook, kneaded down the risen bread, made potato-corn soup.  About then Dennis and Suzanne showed up with their dog Biscuit, so we had four beautiful dogs, tails waving like flags, romping in the slushy snow.  Kerry’s folks pulled out, heading home to NY state, Dennis and Suzanne and I had lunch; then they went over to Hartland Four Corners to look at houses for sale.  They’re thinking of buying a place near our new community.

Kerry and Stephen were off for the day at the Vermont NOFA (New England Organic Farmers Association) meeting.  So I was alone on a Saturday afternoon!  With my favorite opera — Die Zauberflöte — broadcast live from the Met!!  I turned every radio in the house to high volume and pranced through a thorough housecleaning, singing every part from Sarastro to the Queen of the Night.  “Ein Vogelfänger bin ich ja!” I warbled as I danced the vacuum cleaner through the dining room.  “In diesen heil’gen Hallen,” I intoned as I scrubbed the bathtub.  Wheeeeee!

I sang while I planted seeds (petunias, onions), baked the bread, fixed curried lamb and potatoes for supper.  It was a bravura performance — both the Met’s and mine.  (I NEVER would have done this if anyone had been home!  Maybe for a minute; not for the whole opera!)  After the triumphant final chorus I went out with the dogs to enjoy the end of an uncommonly warm day, threw snowballs for Emmett to catch in midair, cleaned out the goose-and-duck stall, swept the barn, fixed a broken window out there, collected the eggs, shut in the animals, admired the sunset over Mount Ascutney.  Back inside I ate my delicious curry and finished some socks I’ve been knitting for Kerry while listening to Prairie Home Companion.

What a great day!

I needed it.  Teaching terms are impossibly busy for me.  This one got doubly bad two weeks ago when a colleague quit in a huff in the middle of the term, leaving his environmental journalism students stranded.  That’s an example of unprofessionalism I have never before witnessed at Dartmouth.  And because I used to teach that course, I had to pick up the pieces.  I soothed the shocked students, sat down and edited all their ungraded papers, and lined up two colleagues to share the course with me for the rest of the term.

It’s working out well — maybe even better than the normal course.  I spent two weeks taking them through the writing of opinion pieces (of course) and talking about journalistic ethics and about one of the books they’d been assigned.  My colleague, the great essay writer Noel Perrin, will work with them on essays.  Then Nancy Serrell, who used to be a science writer for the Valley News and now works for the college news service, will help them with science features.

All fine, except I had four hours of class a day instead of two, and a constant flow of papers to grade.  I’d scramble to get one course’s papers back out just as the other course’s came in.  And if there’s anything I hate, it’s reading student papers!

I love the students, I just hate their papers.  These bright, articulate, fun, funny, thoughtful kids, Ivy League, top students in the nation, somehow, when faced with a paper to write, turn into thick-tongued, long-winded, pretentious, ungrammatical, brain-dead zombies.  It’s an amazing phenomenon.  I blame it not on them but on the teachers and academics and politicians and other authorities whom they’re aping.  I take very seriously my responsibility to undo all that damage — if I’m anything in this life, I’m a crusader for clean writing.  So I concentrate hard on the papers, trying to untangle the verbiage and find the point, if any, trying to provide constructive rather than destructive criticism.  It takes hours and hours.  I have just spent two weeks at it, during which my house went uncleaned, my checkbook unbalanced, my seeds unplanted, my mail unanswered, and my brain anesthetized by awkward, muffled prose.

Now you know why yesterday was such a treat.

In the midst of this academic chaos, the lambs started coming.

Those of you who know the routine at Foundation Farm know that it’s early for lambs.  Two months early.  I have to assume that one of the ram lambs turned precocious last September, right before I separated them from the flock.  I wondered, when I turned in the new ram on November 8 (aiming for lambs on April 9), why nothing happened.  Normally I have to stand back when I turn in the ram; I can watch the first lambs get launched within minutes.  This time everyone just went on grazing.  Maybe — I hope not — they were all already pregnant.

Three of them were, anyway — that’s how many popped last week.  I had seen it coming in the swelling bags and self-absorbed looks of the ewes, so I was on the lookout, though I didn’t approve at all.  There are many problems with such early lambings.  One is that a wet new baby may not make it when it’s 5 below.  Fortunately that didn’t happen; these first three are all fine.  Another problem is that I don’t know who the father is, so I can’t keep these lambs without messing up my breeding records.  Yet another is that neither nursing mothers nor babies will see nutritious green grass for two months.  But the worst problem is that these early lambs tend to be singletons.  That’s what the present three are, all born to experienced ewes who should be having twins, and who probably would have, if they hadn’t bred in their first fall heat cycle, before I upped the nutrition in October expressly to encourage the dropping of two eggs instead of one.

Ah me!  The best laid plans!  The three came within days of each other, a black ram lamb, a white ewe lamb, a black ewe lamb.  Cute little buggers, I have to admit, and it’s great to have these adorable, fuzzy signs of spring appearing in the middle of winter.  The onslaught seems to have stopped for awhile, and the other ewes aren’t looking or acting imminent (though it’s not always possible to tell, under all the wool.)  Maybe the rest will arrive on time.  I can only hope.

The new community has been busy too.  We’ve hired our architect, Jeff Schoellkopf of Warren, Vermont.  He and his team are working with our design committee to begin to sketch out plans.  Peter Forbes is working with our lawyer to draw up the legal agreement for our “limited liability corporation,” a temporary association of all committed members that will commission and oversee the building stage of the community.  Two years from now, ideally, it will sell the land and houses to the final homeowners’ association and disappear.  Presently there’s a lot to think about, to get it structured right.

Last weekend we had a land committee meeting Saturday afternoon to talk about how to manage the land during this transition phase before we live there (go on renting the pastures but restrict the grazing, go on letting the neighbor hay but don’t permit chemical fertilizers, start digging out the thistles, keep the sugaring going) and about how to develop the long-term land-use plan that will tell us where a commercial orchard might go, where a dairy and cheese factory, where the paths by which the cows come home at night, etc.

Then Saturday night we had a clearness meeting for Kerry and Stephen — the last step to bring them in as committed members.  These meetings are long, quiet, honest, beautiful, and very affirming — affirming of the new members and of the vision of the whole community.  At the end of the meeting, Stephen announced that he and Kerry will be GETTING MARRIED next summer, and asked permission to hold the wedding at the new farms!  Isn’t that a beautiful start for our land and community?  We’re excited!  Kerry and her mom and sisters spent this past week shopping for a used wedding gown to rip apart and rebuild.

The meetings went on all the next day, Sunday — and for the first time, they happened at the new farms!  Art and Marie Kirn have moved into the old Curtis house, so from now on we can meet there.  In the morning the DPs (decision partners — committed folks) had a meeting about legal stuff, then the design committee met with Jeff and team.  At noon a potluck began and everyone else arrived, including nine newcomers.  It must be daunting for them to drop into the middle of this process, with so much going on, so many people to get to know!  On the other hand, it must be exciting!

Jeff and team opened the meeting with an hour about the design process, then they went out to walk the land, while the rest of us talked about legal agreements, equity caps, water supply, decision processes, and NAMES.  We don’t yet have a name for the new place.  We have a year-long discussion of names and a long list of possibilities, but none yet that makes everyone go YES!  THAT’S IT!  We have sweet place names that make us sound like your standard-issue condominium.  (Sugarbrook, Cobb Hill, Alder Brook.)  We have ambitious conceptual names that make us sound like your standard-issue hippie commune.  (Integrity, Cornerstone, Watershed.)  We have quirky names.  (Black Fly, Bone Hill, Heartland, my favorite is Ten Turkeys, named after actual turkeys seen at the top of our pasture.)  The obvious name — Four Corners Farm — has, unfortunately, been taken by another farm that started in Hartland and then moved to another town but kept the name.

So we’re waiting until the Perfect Name descends upon us, or we have to grab something fast for our legal documents, whichever comes first.  Suggestions from you will be gratefully received.

Here’s a wonderful piece of news!  The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is starting a meditation center in Woodstock VT, just 10 miles from our new farm, and he has bought a farm to house his practice community right in the Four Corners, just a mile from our place!  This feels like providence to me.  We have been wanting more spiritual grounding, and they could use some help farming.  Maybe we could trade veggies for dharma talks!  Their folks called me the other day, and we’re going to get together soon to see how we can cooperate.

I love it!  The vision gets better and better!  And I’d better get this letter out to you.

Love, Dana