Dear Folks,

It’s 4:30 Saturday afternoon and the last act of Meistersinger is coming over the radio from the Met. The daylight is nearly gone. The days are still short, but not as short as they were in Germany, and we’re a month past the solstice. I’m already thinking of spring. The seed packets are arriving in the mail, and I sort through them with itchy fingers. I’ll plant a few things next weekend, some early flowers like primula and pansy, and some houseplants like gloxinia and cyclamen, just so I can get my hands in the dirt.

Down in the basement I have two garbage cans full of potting soil, which I mixed last October. I use the recipe for soil-block mix out of Eliot Coleman’s gardening book, though I’m not fully sold on soil-blocks. It’s a good recipe for potting soil in any case, so I use it whether I decide to go with soil-blocks or not. The mix includes peat humus and peat moss, which I buy by the bale, and composted horse manure from the pile by Beau’s barn, and sand from the sandpit up Daniels Road, and a bit of lime and greensand and rock phosphate. Yummy stuff for young plants! Just thinking about it makes me want to go plant something right now.

The transition back from Europe to the farm was effortless and joyful. Fasting seems to make jetlag nonexistent. I kept it up for two more days after arriving home, and I was so mellow that I was able to sort through the immense mail piles and the million things to do, full of patience, knowing that everything would get done in its time.

And lots has gotten done. The mail hasn’t all been answered, but the urgent stuff is handled. The systems book is finished and out gathering comments for the final rewrite. (I’m going to be interested to find out whether anyone who isn’t a graduate of the MIT System Dynamics Group can understand it.) The socks I was knitting for John are now warming his feet, and I’ve started a sweater. The seed order went in. The syllabus got prepared for my environmental journalism class, which is now into its third week. I’ve been on one trip to Washington DC to give a speech (in honor of Bob Rodale, or I would never have done it) and on another trip to MIT for a meeting that I’ll tell you more about when the project gets fully into motion. The next set of jobs waiting for me has to do with the Balaton Group — finishing the winter Bulletin, raising money, and finalizing the program for the next annual meeting.

Thanks to Diana not only did the column go out while I was gone, but the accounts were kept current. Thanks to the farm folks all animals and most house plants are thriving. The chicken palace isn’t quite finished, though it’s roofed. The biddies will have to wait until spring to move in. The new furnace was installed and now we are getting 100% of our hot water and heat from wood. (The furnace can burn oil too, and it may have to before the winter is over, because we’re going through our wood supply faster than usual, because wood is now carrying the full load.)

John is embarked on a program to stop up the heat leaks in this big old house. He and a friend brought in a door-sized blower the other day. It gives the whole house a positive air pressure, and then you take a smoke-gun around and watch where the smoke rushes out. Some holes were predictable — around wall sockets and chimney dampers and cat doors. Some others surprised us. The smoked streamed into cracks between sections of the metal stovepipes on our woodstoves. It disappeared into recessed light fixtures in ceilings. It revealed that the peak of our mudroom roof has never been properly sealed. Our windows are pretty tight, but they were never set properly into the walls — the smoke found its way out through the edges of their frames.

Altogether the leaks add up to about the equivalent of a double-size window open to the outside. This in a house that we have been carefully renovating for 20 years! We put in 12 inches of insulation in the walls, and the heat rushes out the ceiling lights and stovepipes! John is now crawling around with a caulking gun, fixing holes.

Sylvia’s book, a story about Faith, one of our most memorable sheep, is 90% done, and it’s amazing! Last fall Sylvia enrolled in a Lebanon College night class on how to write and publish children’s books. It gave her just the encouragement and discipline she needed to move one of her million good ideas toward completion. The teachers loved her work so much that she really cut loose. She let the drawings get as impish and intricate as her fertile mind has always been. They’re terrific! I think the book (the first in a series that could go on indefinitely) will become famous.

Don’t you wish everyone could get the encouragement they need, in the form they can believe, to let all that is in them really come out? Don’t you wish we could do that for ourselves, believe in ourselves without restraint or nattering self-criticism, so we don’t need that outside push? Don’t you wonder how we lost faith in ourselves?

Sylvia’s progress on the book has slowed now, not only because the course is over, but also because she has gotten a “dream job.” She is responsible for keeping 25 horses trained and exercised at a stable in Woodstock. It’s a full-time job, and it has come just at the time of year when Don’s house-painting work slows down, so he has become chief cook, child-sitter, and barn chore-doer. He seems to be surviving, and even taking well to it. Heather is busy much of the day with kindergarten anyway. She just played a wolf in a school play. She made her own wolf-ears, pink with sparkles. Anytime Heather has her hand in a project it comes out pink with sparkles.

When you go away from a 5-year-old for three months, you come back to find a new person. Heather has gotten taller and more civilized (slightly more, anyway) and she has learned a tremendous amount in three short months. She knows her left hand from her right. She has mastered concepts of time that she was struggling with when I left. “Is this Saturday? Do I go to school on Saturday?” She comes out with words like “cooperation” and “disgusted.” She can make all her letters, and she can make them go right-to-left or left-to-right with equal ease, which is more than I can do. She makes books by sticking leaves of paper together with tape and then she supplies text and illustrations. She can’t spell anything but HEATHER, so she comes to us for help. “Dana, how do you spell TOMORROW?” “How do you spell I LOVE YOU?” “How do you spell HELLO, I AM RICH.” So, letter by letter HELLO, I AM RICH goes into her book.

What kind of culture implants into the heads of 5-year-olds the simultaneous messages I LOVE YOU and HELLO, I AM RICH?

John has gone off with a friend to New York this weekend to tour art galleries. I am in charge of Brenna, which is no trouble, since she’s quite responsible and self-sufficient. Now that she’s 16 she can even drive herself around or hook rides with her friends. Her friend Jessie is staying with her this weekend. I’ve just made them a potato and corn chowder and some oatmeal-raisin muffins for supper, and then I’m taking them to the movies. (As much of a treat for me as for them, since I just about never go to the movies.)

So I’ve stepped right back into my regular life, and everything feels pretty much the same. I’m writing columns, teaching, trying to keep up with the paper stream, just like always. But then again, moment-to-moment and month-to-month, life is never the same. There is learning and growth and discovery and opportunity. And there are losses. This month felt to me like one of losses, because some great people have disappeared from the ongoing flow of life, though their influence on me and many other people will continue to unfold.

One of those lost was Anne Frey, who died of pneumonia at the age of 90+ just a few days before I came home. Anne was a great lady of Hanover, a concert pianist once and a sculptress nearly to the end of her days, and a warrior. She’s the only sweet little old lady I ever knew whose basement was stacked with MAKE LOVE NOT WAR signs and AMERICA OUT OF NICARAGUA and SUPPORT THE TROOPS: STOP THE GULF WAR. Anne’s house was the meeting place of the radicals of the valley. In her living room our Upper Valley Land Trust was born — and who knows how many other good causes? Anne supported them with money and space and time and enthusiasm. She would shoot approving notes to me when she thought one of my columns was sufficiently hard-hitting, and admonishing notes if she thought I had gone too soft. I liked to drop by her house for tea and hear her memories of the first performance of Porgy and Bess in her living room, and many other extraordinary events she was part of.

We knew, as Anne grew frailer, that we would soon lose her, but still her death was a shock, because her spirit and feistiness never grew frail. To me she was an example of eternal youth independent of age. I’ll miss her.

Then, on the day I was flying back home, a giant fell, John Kemeny, the great mathematics teacher and the best president Dartmouth has ever had. It was because of John that Dennis and I came to Dartmouth twenty years ago — because of the wonderful computer system he pioneered here, and because of his personal encouragement of us, and because of our enormous admiration for him. He was a brilliant Hungarian Jewish refugee kid, who became a research assistant for Albert Einstein and then the head of the math department at Dartmouth, and then its president. He made Dartmouth co-ed and brought in its first woman professors, including me. He was one of the few people on campus with whom Dennis and I could share our computer models and our publications.

Jimmy Carter asked John Kemeny to chair the investigative commission to examine the accident at Three Mile Island, and one of the great memories of my life is the speech John gave to the Dartmouth community on the day he returned from that assignment. If there was an Olympic competition in brilliant teaching, this performance would have won him a 10.0 and a gold medal. Within an hour he had taught several thousand of us exactly how a nuclear power plant works, why this one didn’t work, what should be done to keep it from happening again, and what the whole event portended for the future of nuclear power. I took tapes of that speech to IIASA in Vienna, to show the international community and especially the Russians — but it clearly didn’t get to the ones who ran Chernobyl.

After his extraordinary presidency John Kemeny became, at his request, a math professor again. He was shy man, soft-spoken and funny and loving, and he lived by an absolute integrity that will continue to inspire me. He died suddenly of a heart attack. There was a beautiful memorial service for him in Hanover, attended by thousands of people who revered him as I did. I was not the only one who wept through the whole service, except when I was laughing at memories of John’s wit and determination and kindness.

And yes, there was a third blow, which came just a few weeks later. Peter Buettner of Brattleboro Vermont finally found peace in his long, extraordinary adventure with cancer. Pete taught me how to have cancer. I don’t only remember him for that — I met him because he was a pioneer in bringing systems thinking to the schools of Brattleboro. But several years before I found out that I had cancer, Pete was diagnosed with a tumor in the back of his mouth. He responded with a newsletter to all his friends, describing the whole experience, embellished with every doctor joke and hospital cartoon he could find. (There are lots of them, almost as many as lawyer jokes and economist jokes, and just as richly deserved.) Though I was supremely uninteresting in cancer at the time, I was moved by his newsletter. And then when cancer became a subject of intense personal interest to me, I was inspired by him.

Pete taught me that cancer is an adventure, as much of a life challenge, as much of a teacher, as anything else that can happen. His own adventure was long and fascinating, with many ups and downs, remissions and recurrences. He made system dynamics models of his tumors and showed them to his doctors. He reluctantly did almost everything his doctors recommended, and he wholeheartedly tried out alternative therapies. He did so with absolute faith that they would work. Before I left for Germany he sent me a note telling me how when I got back he would be strong enough to get going on systems teaching again. I have never seen such mental toughness. My non-expert assessment is that his determination kept him alive for years. And in the end, it was not enough.

One of the great gifts my cancer gave me was the ability to be with and learn from other cancer patients. It’s easy for me to say what they’ve taught me about life, but not easy to say what they’ve taught me about cancer, especially about the “mind-over-matter” debate, which cruelly forces each cancer patient to “prove” his or her position in the debate through the course of his or her own disease. I have seen other believers in the power of self-healing besides Pete die of cancer. But I don’t see him or any of the others as a “failure,” or as someone who has “lost the battle,” as the saying so often goes. We all “lose the battle” with death sooner or later. We don’t all choose to see it as “losing a battle.” And I don’t think a death from cancer carries any more — or less — symbolism about a person’s life than does a death from a heart attack, like John Kemeny’s or a death from pneumonia at age 90+ like Anne Frey’s.

I guess I’m more interested in how people live than how they die, and I’m coming to see that how they die is just one small piece of how they live.

What I’m trying to do now is feel not only my sadness at the absence of these three great people, but also my gratitude at having known them, and at the fact that they still live in me and in many other people.

And, of course there have not only been endings this month, there have been historic beginnings. There is a new president who, on his THIRD DAY IN OFFICE renewed U.S. participation in international family planning programs and abolished the Council on Competitiveness! Wow! When that happened I realized how I have stopped expecting my government ever to do anything sane like that. Over the past twelve hard years I have come to assume that I have to oppose my government over just about everything. It will be a pleasure to retract some of my sourness and rediscover some hope in high places. Not too much hope, as I hope this month’s columns make clear.

Endings and beginnings, returns and transitions. My spot on the earth is tilting back toward the sun again. My systems book ended, to my surprise, with a warning about expecting systems analysis or anything else to explain absolutely everything, and with an ode to uncertainty and mystery. I feel suffused with uncertainty and mystery on this misty, thawing early evening in late January, and I feel content Not to Know.

Love to you all,

Dana