Dear Folks,
Whew! What can I say?
It’s been quite a week!
The very best part has been the rejoicing of all my friends. The Germans have a word Schadenfreude, which means, if I understand it right, taking joy in the bad luck or suffering of other people. I don’t know whether there’s an opposite — Freudenfreude? — which means taking joy in the joy of others. Anyway, some human beings may be twisted enough to feel Schadenfreude, but LOTS of human beings feel Freudenfreude, as has been demonstrated to me all week.
You should have heard my answering machine when I arrived home on Tuesday night. There’s a new reason to have an answering machine — you have a tape record you can keep and replay — in this case an outpouring of excitement and love. The e-mail brought in messages from all over the world. My paper mail (snail mail) is still brimming every day. I hadn’t realized how publicized MacArthur awards are, and how people really pay attention to them.
I guess the wide public appeal comes from the MacArthur Foundation’s wonderful, uplifting premise — that there are many people quietly doing good work, and that funding them and publicizing them raises the spirits of everyone who’s out there doing good work. Just imagine — a benevolent force is watching, and out of the blue it may reward you in THIS world, not the next one! Money dropping down out of the sky! The very possibility makes you feel warm inside.
I know at least a dozen MacArthur Fellows, and I have occasionally written supporting letters for people who have been nominated, so I’m very aware that the awards exist, though I’ve never understood the process. I even knew that I had been nominated, thanks to the dear indiscretions of some of my foreign friends, who were asked to write letters about me. I was thunderstruck simply at the thought that I was under consideration and never thought I would be chosen — especially since more than one year and one selection process had passed since I found out that I was nominated. (I now know that the “folders” in the MacArthur office may accumulate information for years. I also know that there are hundreds and hundreds of them.) I don’t know who nominated me. I’m beginning to find out who wrote letters for me.
My first thought when I got the phone call was that I could farm for five years and do nothing else! (You know the old joke about farm economics. The farmer wins the Megabucks and $100 million. They ask what he’ll do with the money. He says, “Well, I guess I’ll just go on farming till it’s gone!”) It didn’t take me long to come up with a better plan, when I thought of what the Balaton Group needs. I expect my plan will evolve as the five years go on. It’s an incredible opportunity to stop and reflect and re-center myself on my life purposes, and pray, and open myself to the wonderful possibilities from both the money and the publicity.
The first check arrives July 1. It will be for $15,500.
My gosh!
Alan AtKisson likes to quote a great Buddhist joke that goes, “After enlightenment, the rent check.” So, after the MacArthur, the hay. Pat McNamara cut our hay the Friday morning of the phone call from MacArthur, and that afternoon John rolled off for the weekend, leaving me with down hay and a forecast of thunderstorms.
I called Don and Sylvia, of course. Bless their hearts, they were willing to come help with what is usually the hardest, hottest, tensest job of the farm year. Saturday afternoon Pat started up his baler, the sky clouded over, I called South Royalton where the Spains now live, they shot down here, and we got the bales in the barn lickety split, long before the rain came. The task was lightened, unfortunately, by the fact the the cut was light — way too light. I only got half the amount of hay I need to get the sheep through the winter. So I’m going to have to buy the rest and fertilize my field.
While the Spains lived here, we put the manure from their horses on that field, plus the ash from our many wood stoves. But that nutrient load was clearly not equal to what we’ve been taking off in hay, even though we’ve been taking only one cut a year. So when I call Fred Sullivan to see if I can buy some hay from him, I’ll see if I can buy several truckloads of cow manure.
After the MacArthur, the manure.
It’s suddenly high summer here, the greens so thick and deep that they seem almost oppressive after the openness of winter and the delicate lace of spring. The views have closed in. So have the mosquitoes. The corn and tomatoes in the garden double nearly every day. So do the weeds. And the deer flies. It has been uncharacteristically hot this week, in the 90s every day, with the sun at its solstice peak I have stayed out of the garden, which means today I have to go out there and fight dragons. (Well, crab grass, anyway.) Fortunately we had a string of thunderstorms last night, and today it’s cooler.
The dogs hate thunderstorms. When one brews up during the night, I wake to find one big black nose on the bed on one side of me, and another big black nose on the other side of me. What they would like is to crawl in bed with me, but these are big dogs, who have most likely spent the day rolling in manure piles. So they crawl under the bed, until the sky stops booming.
Suzanne came to stay Friday night, and Saturday morning before the heat got too intense, she helped me freeze spinach — a huge task, which is much more fun with two people to do it. (Suzanne lived on the farm for years, and, like Don and Sylvia, she knows how to step straight back into whatever’s going on. For those of you new to this newsletter, she’s now married to my ex-husband Dennis, and I still love the both of them!) I had two, long, gorgeous rows of spinach and had been eating salads out of them for weeks, but the hot weather always sends the intolerant spinach into seed-heads. Suzanne and I snatched it out of the garden just in time. You should have seen the bushel-baskets of glowing-green leaves. It’s like freezing emeralds, I told Suzanne. She’s nutty enough to be able to join me in enthusing over the beauty of a basketful of spinach. So we washed and chopped spinach and chatted away.
The turnips, kohlrabi, and STRAWBERRIES are ready to eat. The peonies, irises, Sweet William, roses, and petunias are gloriously in bloom. I mostly have Siberian iris, but I ordered some fancy bearded iris from White Flower Farm, in order to start an iris empire, and their blooms are so magnificent they just bowl me over. My plan is to let them grow and multiply in the good soil of the main garden, and to divide and transplant them until I cover the whole 70 acres.
All day long the farm is filled with the mad songs of catbirds and red-eyed vireos and common yellowthroats (witchety-o-witchety-o-witchety-o-witchety-o). The best salads of the year, made from the first, tenderest greens, are just over. The peas are blooming, and the potatoes have bloom buds. I have an enormous amount to do to finish mulching and staking and weeding and getting the garden set for summer. But if I work hard this week, that part should be done. Then the only problem will be keeping up with the harvest.
After the MacArthur, the weeds.
John and I are holding everything together still, to my great surprise. I’m doing virtually no traveling (which doesn’t bother me) and much less writing (which does bother me). I’m having fun, but clearly this has to be a temporary phase. Slowly, much too slowly, we are creeping toward a new physical structure and a new farm community. The back house is still under major reconstruction. John is doing it in between house inspections and other carpentry jobs, and I’m worried at the pace, but I know John well enough that I should have expected it. He is the most meticulous workman in the world. He saves every sound board and nail he pulls out. He uses recycled material at every turn. He builds SOLID. He takes twice as long and costs half as much as anyone else. I admire that, so I have to stop being jumpy.
The back house has to be finished by September, because a new couple is coming then — I will introduce you to them properly when they arrive. Alicia Korten will live here during August to help farm — she’s the daughter of David and Fran Korten who are friends and co-conspirators of mine. Meanwhile, this being summer in New Hampshire, there is a steady stream of visitors, some of whom, like Suzanne, are really helpful. Jan Wright, a friend from New Zealand who’s getting a PhD from the Kennedy School at Harvard, came up two weekends ago and doubled what I would have accomplished alone that weekend.
For the longer term, we are doing a detailed survey, showing all the contours and trees and fences of the five acres still buildable according to our conservation easement. We’ll use that survey to lay out a larger community. Both families who were ready to buy in have gone on to buy other houses, because they couldn’t wait as long as this process is going to take. But there are other folks still contemplating coming here. There may be another opening soon, as John decides what to do next in his life. With Brenna going off to college, he has more freedom than he has had for the past 18 years, and I suspect he may very well decide that he wants more privacy and more control than he can have in this community, or maybe any community.
So stay tuned. Foundation Farm looks very peaceful on the surface this summer. It is more orderly than it has ever been. It is heartbreakingly beautiful. And it is brewing up some changes.
Since this seems to be a newsletter about the past and future of the farm, I should tell you long-time readers that Karel and Stephanie, who lived here four years ago, got married, and moved away, have moved back to the Upper Valley. They stopped by today to show me their second baby, David, born three weeks ago. Their firstborn, Pavel, is a blonde, sweet two-year-old. David looks like a calm little Buddha.
I’ll end with one of my favorite recipes for June heaven. Go out in the garden and pull up a few green onions and 8-10 young turnips, a little bigger than golf balls. While you’re out there pick a pint of strawberries. Heat a coating of olive oil in a small saucepan, toss in the chopped green onions and a cup of kasha (buckwheat). Toss them till they’re toasted, pour in two cups of water, cover, and let them cook up on low heat. Pour more oil in a frying pan and throw in the chunked-up turnip balls. While they cook to just barely soft, pull out the young, tender leaves from each turnip plant, chop them, and throw them in with the turnips. (Feed the bigger, tougher leaves to the chickens and let them cycle back to you in eggs.) When the turnips are tender and the leaves cooked down, cover them with grated Vermont cheddar.
Pile the kasha on a plate, cover with cheesy turnips, and enjoy, even if you think you don’t like turnips. Finish off with strawberries, just plain. Serves two.
Yum! You’ll feel the vitamins surging through your system for hours afterward.
After the MacArthur, the turnips!
Love,
Dana
