Hi Folks! It’s early Sunday morning, frosty outside — 10 degrees, deep crusted snow.  We’re having a classic March, which means snowy and stormy.  The sun, when it shines, pours down heartening warmth.  But then clouds roll in, and a blizzard dumps another load of white stuff.

Last week I got caught driving up from Boston in one of those blizzards.  Snow, sleet, freezing rain, one of those storms where it comes down so fast you can’t even keep your windows clear.  Cars sliding off the road left and right.  You are an idiot to be out here today, I told myself.  And the real problem, I replied to me, as 4WD Cherokees and Explorers sloshed past, is that no one else is out here except other idiots.

Well, my little Honda and I made it home safely, after five hours of terror.  We’ve had two more snows since then.

Hey, but we’re upbeat, because we know how fast spring does spring around here, when it finally gets moving.  So we’re busy getting ready.  Scot, finally back from his term of tropical ecology, spent yesterday in our basement workshop building a massive plant stand with growlights to support seedlings.  We have a seedling space crunch.  Our south windows were perfectly geared to a self-sufficient homestead scale of production — maybe 40 trays of seedlings.  Now suddenly we have three acres plowed up and a lot of serious farmers in the house.  The necessary number of seedling trays has shot up into the hundreds.  We will be able to put up our lean-to greenhouse and hoop house soon, but in the meantime, zillions of tomatoes and peppers have to get planted.  (The celery and leeks and pansies and early greens already are.)

So we’re filling the house with stands and going to artificial light.  If we stay on this farm one more year, we’re going to have to think seriously about a professional-size greenhouse.

Meanwhile, outside, I’ve started pruning apple trees.  I saw two wood ducks on the brook this morning.  The barn ducks are laying.  The daffodils are poking up on the south side of the house.  Folks who do sugaring are hard at it.  (We’d sugar, if we had a lot of extra firewood, which we never do in March.)  And the sheep are sheared.  The shearer came just yesterday.  He talked me into shearing before lambing for a change; I’ve had a prejudice against doing that, from one experience long ago when we had some bad malpresentations.  Flip those ladies upside down, and maybe you twist around the lambs inside, I thought.  So I kept my pregnant ewes right side up.  Pishtush and balderdash! says David Hinman, our opinionated shearer.  You’re going to find lambing so much easier when you can see what’s going on under all that fuzz.  And the lambs will be able to find what they need much easier too.  Off with the wool!

So I tried it, and now I’m feeling guilty throwing hay to my shaved sheep this cold morning.  They seem not at all bothered, however.  Lambing is two weeks away and udders are already swelling.  Hey, getting exciting around here!

I have to run to the Plainfield church, half a mile up the road, because it’s Palm Sunday, and our handbell choir is playing.  My Mom in Oklahoma has been playing in a church bell choir for years, and she’s a pro, but I’ve just started.  This will be our second performance.  We’re doing “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee,” the theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Easy stuff, but fun to do.  Even easy stuff sounds nice on the bells.

(After church now — we didn’t make a single mistake.  Walked home down Daniels Road waving a palm frond in the cold sunshine.)

My heart is far from joyful, because the farms in Hartland are not going to be ours.  The Hunts have said they don’t even want to negotiate with us any more.  I was stunned to get that news.  I thought after six months of progressively higher offers and what felt like a meeting of the minds, that they would accept our third try.  I still don’t know for sure why they didn’t.  (There was a distinctly unhelpful realtor in the way; the Hunts have never been comfortable talking directly to us.)  But we had gone as high as we could go and bent as far as we could bend.  If you can’t even negotiate, if you haven’t been able to build any human relationship, there doesn’t seem to be a way forward.  I wonder whether the Hunts really intend to sell their farm, and I have some dire suspicions about their realtor.  In any case, I can see nothing more to do.

So I (tearfully) told the Curtises that they’d better sell to another buyer as soon as possible.  And I broke the news to the community group.  That brought an interesting set of reactions.  Some just won’t accept it, and they’re trying to find back doors to the Hunts, bless them.  Some revealed their doubts about that land or the pace of our process.  They were actively relieved by what feels to me like a huge setback.  Some shrugged their shoulders, said that’s too bad, and started organizing to look for other land.

As for me, I got paralyzed.  All along I have felt that I didn’t choose those farms, that they reached out and grabbed me.  I never seriously considered moving from Foundation Farm until I saw the ones in Hartland.  The first time I saw them, I could visualize the community there so clearly it was as if it had already been built.  And though I went through the motions and looked at other farms, I never saw one that caused me to doubt for a second that Hartland Four Corners was the place for us.

Sure there are problems with those farms, as the doubters continuously pointed out.  Slopes to the east, not south.  Bottom land too wet on one side and too dry on the other.  Not enough hay land.  Hunts have bashed the heck out of their forest.  Ugly little subdivision right there in the middle.  Way overpriced.

Right, right, but no farm is perfect, and I was not the only one in the group caught by the magic of those high pastures, the trickling little stream, the Windsor loam.  We could move water from wet to dry.  We could restore the forest.  The little subdivision (right on prime soils once owned by the Hunts) could be incorporated eventually into our community — we could garden it from one end to the other.  And divide the price by twenty families plus the Sustainability Institute and it came out downright reasonable.

Well, you see, I’m still having trouble letting go.  I’m struggling to understand how we could have been so attracted to that land for a whole year, if it is not the place for us — and I’m trying to grasp what IS the place for us.  So I’m reeling, turning in place, wondering what the lesson is here, waiting for guidance.  It feels strange to be stopped so thoroughly after a whole year of leading the charge.

The good news is that the vacuum I’m creating is filling itself with the activity and leadership of others.  The year hasn’t been wasted.  Powered by the vision of those Hartland farms, it has been spent building human relationships, shared vision, common vocabulary, and commitment.  So others in the group are moving forward, other properties are showing up.  I’m just watching, in wonder and gratitude.  I know I’ll be back in action again, when I get some certainty about which direction is right.

And of course the image of me being stopped is only relative to my normal full-steam-ahead pace.  I’m back at work on my textbook, which feels good.  This time we push through to the end.  It’s at the top of my priority list.  And second on my priority list is the new Sustainability Institute.  It just was granted its tax-exempt status by the IRS, and we had a retreat down in Boston last week (which is why I was driving back in the storm) to begin to put it in motion.

We did a visioning session, which is how I start any new enterprise, picturing the Institute ten years from now, then five, then two.  We all saw more or less the same thing; a top-notch analytical and educational facility, doing excellent research on sustainability issues, putting out publications (and a radio show), putting on workshops and teaching programs.  Around it, connected with the community farm, are demonstrations of organic growing, sustainable forestry, alternative energy sources.  (I got a clear picture of the biogas plant using the manure from the dairy barn.)  The clear parts of our vision that distinguish our institute from the many other good ones that already exist are:

– we’re systems-based in the rigorous sense (doing actual modeling, not just saying the word “systems” all the time),

– we’re sustainability-based in the broadest sense — not just energy or agriculture or water or forestry, but also economics and history and worldviews and ethics,

– we do our best to live and demonstrate sustainability in our own workplace, homes, and community.

The vision is clear; getting there is the problem, so we began to sketch out a three-year plan.  We’ve started with the commodity modeling (see last month’s newsletter).  Probably for at least a year we won’t have a physical place; we’ll go on working out of our existing offices and homes here and in Boston.  In our vision we saw ourselves moving into new offices two years from now, though I’m antsy (as always) to move faster than that.  Most of the interested group consists of bright young MIT graduates scattered around the Boston area, and I know how much faster and better we’ll work when we’re physically together, able to touch base and inspire each other every day.  But, as with the farm, we’ll have to get there step by step and some of the steps will be backward.  Our first projects, for which we’re writing proposals now, are further work on specific commodities (forest products, shrimp, corn, sugar, aluminum), the development of a basic curriculum and some short booklets on sustainability, and radio spots for WVPR.  We’ll fold my textbook and column and this newsletter into the Institute too.

Meanwhile, on the email — email is proving an amazing community tool.  I don’t know how many people are participating in our community discussion list, but they live in Maine and Virginia and Chile as well as Boston and the Upper Valley here, and a lot of good stuff is coming out.  Sometimes you can talk more eloquently about difficult topics in writing than in speaking, and there’s time to go over what others say more than once, and to think before responding.  This month the hard topics have been money and farms.

The money discussion was raging while we still thought we’d have to come up with a lot of it soon to buy the Hartland farms.  Money, the craziest topic in our society, and we were poking hard into the depths of the craziness.  Why, when all of us in the discussion are about equally talented, equally hardworking, do some of us have no money and others have considerable savings?  Is it the inequities of the world?  Or an external expression of our internal assessments of self-worth?  In order to earn and save enough to buy into the community, does one have to sell one’s soul and energy to evil forces for years and years?  Or can one manifest money doing good things?  If those who have more than enough make a mortgage fund to help out those who don’t, is that a form of enslavement?  Should one ever pay or receive interest?  Or government money?  Should one ever live from the labor of others?  (As if we didn’t all do that all the time!)

I can’t claim that we solved those issues, but we did air them and express our deepest thoughts about them with a tone of tolerance and exploration that was refreshing and exciting.  I think I’ll put some of the discussion into the community newsletter we issue sporadically, to preserve and spread the questions.  I’m sure we will be wrestling with money for the life of the community.  We want to transcend the social craziness.  We don’t want to measure human worth with dollars.  We want to act on our values, not on money payoffs — and yet, of course, we have to exist with integrity in the world of money.  We want to experiment, to see how far we can go in community with turning money into a tool for our life purposes, rather than becoming tools of the demands of money.

And then, when the farms fell through and land became an issue again, the conversation turned to farming (actually, it was still about money).  The non-farmers among us said, why do we need all that land, anyway?  Isn’t it just a lot of work and expense?  And won’t we, who will not make our living from the land, be subsidizing those who do?

That word “subsidize” set off a flurry.  Some people pointed out how farmers subsidize the rest of us all the time.  Others said that the real subsidy would be to those who work at Dartmouth, because we’ll pay twice as much for a farm within commuting distance of Hanover.  The vegetarians questioned whether we really need pastures, whether we need to keep animals in captivity.  We almost lost our nice tolerant tone there for a minute.  But then Stephen weighed in with some passionate epistles about relationship with the land, about the production of food, about the integration of animals into the cycles of nature.

The city folks began asking questions to educate themselves — how much land does it actually take to support a farm family?  Why do farmers earn so little when they work so hard?  Stephen sketched out a rough business plan for a small dairy/vegetable CSA, which was a worthwhile exercise in itself, and very revealing, again, of the money craziness of the world.  I concluded from it that without community support, a starting farmer now can probably never earn enough to buy the farm, at least not within commuting distance to Hanover.  That’s because the world is willing to pay a lot to put land under condominiums but will pay only a pittance keep it under pasture and vegetables.

Well, you know where I stand on the farming issue.  Of course the discussion group is not the eventual community; it’s folks who are trying out the idea and language of community.  Talk over email is cheap; commitment is what counts.  We may have many communities in the conversation, some of which will be urban and not pay for a lot of pasture (though it would be nice if they did so through paying for their milk.)  The community I’m committed to will have as much land as it can handle, and it will take excellent care of that land and feed those urban communities, and somehow it will allow farmers to be co-owners of their own means of production in a way the farmers can afford.

So back at the present farm — Stephen has been repairing the stoneboat that got smashed in the horse accident in January, and he’s going to be working with a local farrier and draft-horse guy to continue training Mari and Cassima.  Kerry is making great progress — she can bend her knees now (you will never appreciate what a wonderful privilege that is, unless you are ever deprived of it).  That means she can sit in a chair, ride in a car, slide up and down stairs on her bum, and now even walk, slowly but steadily, on crutches.  She’s gaining strength, cooking dinner sometimes, and working two days a week as a cashier in our coop.  Next Tuesday she goes to the doctor, and we’re hoping she’ll progress to the next step, bending her ankles.

Chrissie’s busy in the greenhouses at Edgewater Farm, planting out flowers into bedding trays.  Scot is beginning to study for his general exam, one of the more formidable hoops you have to go through to get a Ph.D. — it’s scheduled for May.  Stephen is studying to be a yoga teacher and just taught his first class.  Anne is practicing her French horn, sorting her many special veggie varieties for spring planting (she’s particularly into the native Americans, peppers, potatoes, sunflowers, corn, beans, squash), learning her way around the Upper Valley, and penetrating the Dartmouth library system to continue her research on Agent Orange.  I’m on a rye sourdough baking kick — I finally managed to develop a really active sourdough starter.  Kerry, Chrissie and I are knitting like crazy, knowing that the long evenings for knitting are about to disappear for six months.  We have a big household now, which means both that it’s easier to get things crowded and messy, and that there are more hands to help clean up.

And — wonders! — hanging over our barn, just after sunset, is the comet!  This is the second one — last year Hyakutake made a long, bright streak over the barn just at lambing time.  Hale-Bopp is more fanned out, and will be even brighter, once, as our local weatherman says, “the full moon is out of the way.”  We rarely have clear skies here in March, but when we do, I turn my head constantly to that gorgeous comet.  I can see why ancient people saw comets as harbingers of something extraordinary about to happen.

Love, Dana