Dear Folks,

It’s a brisk Sunday morning, 40 degrees, half-cloudy. The sun, just lifting over the eastern hill, is turning Mount Ascutney brilliant red. As I look out my window (probably the last time I will be looking out this window as I write this newsletter), the land is revealing itself again, as the leaves stream down and the long views open. The maples and locusts are just about bare; the apples and ashes are half-unleafed; the oaks are in their glory, their dark reds and deep golds, the dying embers of the October fire, glowing against the deep green pine and hemlock.

We had our first killing frost on October 7, a date that is becoming normal in this greenhouse world, two weeks later than it used to be 27 years ago, when I moved to this farm. Now that the frost comes so late, we’re kind of glad to see it, because it stops the overwhelming tide of tomatoes and beans and cucumbers and leaves us just with just the frost-hardy crops to deal with. Stephen and Kerry’s CSA customers are now getting boxes of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, potatoes, parsley, celeriac, leeks, onions. Next week will be the last CSA delivery. S&K have already stopped going to the farmers’ market; they’ve sold out of fall vegetables.

They had a good year, in spite of the drought and all the watering, watering, watering. They increased their garden to 3 1/2 acres, produced tons of beautiful stuff, and sold it all with no problem. Next year on the new farm they’ll go up to 6 or so acres and will really have to hustle to keep all that going! It’s good that they’ll have Michael and Amanda to help them.

I love it when the season swings around to the fall crops; they taste of harvest and heartiness. Yesterday was my day to cook, so as usual I canvassed the garden and root cellar to see what to make. I started with the big bags of dropped apples Michael and Amanda and Libby had gleaned from a nearby orchard and made an apple pie and two gallons of applesauce — some of which I froze, but the rest suggested potato pancakes for supper. Plenty of potatoes down cellar. I went out to my garden and harvested a salad of Chinese cabbage, parsley, carrots and celeriac, with a mustard dressing. (While I was out there I dug up amaryllis bulbs and gladiolus corms for transfer over to Hartland.) I cooked up two big squash, a butternut and a buttercup, for a squash-meringue pie, and I baked sourdough rye-pesto bread. That was supper. Yum! Only in the fall do we have suppers like that!

OK, the topic I am avoiding here, the topic I have been avoiding all summer and especially all this month, the topic I am nevertheless indirectly pointing to as I celebrate the fall glories of this farm, the topic that is actually always on my mind and is finally crashing in on me as very real and no longer avoidable is — The Move.

We have to be out of here by December 1.

I have assumed that we need to devote the full month of November to this enterprise. You can’t imagine how complicated it will be. We have a barn, a tractor shed, a garage, a basement, and an attic, full of 27 years of accumulated old tires and lumber and HEAVY old woodstoves and tools and nails and other detritus, much of it left by the dozens of people who have lived here. I’m not even sure what all that stuff is. We have to move five cows, three horses, three cats, two dogs, one gander and 75 chickens along with their chicken house. We have two root cellars and two freezers full of a winter’s food supply. We have seventeen million gazillion books and no shelves over in the Hunt house. We have a baby grand piano and a tractor and a bush hog and chipper and a manure spreader and cords of dry firewood. We have to fit seven people and their furniture into a house two-thirds the size of this one.

Meanwhile, in order to be insurable, I have been told by the insurance company, I have to have the Hunt house and barn rewired and the chimneys rebuilt. I have already had to remove the underground oil tanks at Foundation Farm, and now my uphill neighbors (not my favorite neighbors) are demanding the return of their border stones that somehow got moved in the process. I have to fix all sorts of broken things around here, from a louvered closet door to a huge downed pine tree, problems that I am unwilling to pass on to Scrib and Susan, who are buying the place.

In the meantime I have to keep writing columns and keep the Sustainability Institute going and work on the finances and permits for Cobb Hill. I’ve dropped the Beyond the Limits revision; it just didn’t get done in time and now won’t be picked up again until spring, after my winter term course is over.

Gee, thanks, folks, for letting me complain to you about all this. I feel beleaguered and sorry for myself — all because of my own decisions, of course. Nobody got me into this pickle but me. I know I live with wonderful people who will help me pull all this off. But at this point I can’t believe we’re actually going to get it all done.

None of the above is the real problem, of course.

The real problem is the emotional wrench of leaving this place.

There’s a part of me, which has been strong and sure for three years now, ever since I first saw the Hunt and Curtis farms and envisioned the Sustainability Institute there and a cohousing community and a big, thriving farm. That part of me that knows without the slightest doubt that I’m doing the right thing. I’m moving toward my dream, a larger community, a larger farm, a wonderful vision that is actually, and quite miraculously, beginning to happen. I have done all I can do and learned all I can learn at Foundation Farm. I’m leaving it in much better shape than it was in when Dennis and I bought it in 1972, and even in better shape than when I took it over by myself in 1988. I leave it with a feeling of completion, turning it over to a family that will love it, going on to something that will be — a year or so from now, when Cobb Hill is built — much better for me and for the world.

But then there’s another part of me that I have been steadfastly shushing up for three years now, that part of me that has sunk deep, deep roots into beautiful Foundation Farm and that is in mourning. For the next month or so I’m not going to be able to shove that part down any more.

I’ve gotten just far enough into sorting and packing to be awaking all the buried memories. I started with easy stuff — getting rid of most of my clothes — which got me into the big trunk in which I store summer clothes in winter and winter clothes in summer, and underneath the clothes a lifetime of old photos, grade-school report cards, letters home from when Dennis and I were in Asia, pictures of this place when we first moved in. You know I’m not exactly inarticulate when I write this monthly letter to you, words come easily to me, but I can’t begin to express all the feelings that got stirred up as I sorted through those pictures and letters (and threw a lot of them out). A lot happens in a life, doesn’t it? So much joy and sorrow, fun and regret, adventure and mistakes. Normally I spend zero time living in the past — I have so much in the present to do — so I wasn’t really prepared for the nostalgic wallop waiting for me in that old trunk.

This is just the beginning. It’s going to be a roller-coaster month. I look around this place and can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else and wonder how I ever got myself into this and wonder if I could cancel the whole plan. And at the same time I share Stephen and Kerry’s joy that finally, after years of migration, they are going to be setting up on a farm on which they will be SETTLED. It’s the feeling I’ve always had on this farm. The feeling that I was going to live here forever, so whatever I did should be done with forever in mind. It’s such a wonderful way to live. Settled. As Ivan Illich says, living in your own tracks. Therefore deeply, intrinsically, long-term responsible. Responsible, as I no longer can be for Foundation Farm, because I have known for three years now that I was going to leave it.

So here’s the good news. Actually there’s lots of good news, which I need to remind myself of.

I’m going to be relieved, along with Stephen and Kerry, of the intolerable stretch across the river, the mental and physical and financial burden of trying to think about and keep up two farms, a 20-minute drive apart (only 3 miles as the crow flies, but the crow doesn’t have to use bridges). I was cracking under that strain. It was to relieve it that we decided to move early, a year or more before Cobb Hill is finished, and camp out in the Hunt house.

More good news — I’m going to have to get rid of 90% of everything I own. Once I’ve done it, I’m going to like that. One of my big purposes is to simplify, simplify, rid my life of clutter and stuff, put my energy into people and land and community, not property and accumulations of things. I’m really not much thing-oriented to begin with, but after 27 years of living in a place with lots of basement and attic and barn space, I’ve accumulated way too much stuff, all of which feels like a burden. It will be a relief to be rid of it.

And more — I’m an orderly person, an Enneagram One. There are messes around here, created by myself and others, that really bother me but that I never have time to sort out. Now I HAVE to sort them out. Under no other condition would I have given myself permission to take a month off just to sort things out.

The best news is the community I’m moving into. Stephen and Kerry, Marsha, Amanda, Michael and Libby will be living in the Hunt house with me. Beth and Phil will be right on the other side of the fields and Marie and Art around the corner at the old Curtis place. That’s already six potential Cobb Hill families, with others not far away. Though the permits are arranged yet, nor the financing, nor the bylaws, not to mention the construction, the community is forming anyway. And the community is the people, not the permits or bylaws or construction.

* * *

In testimony to that claim, it’s now several hours later, and we’ve been over at Cobb Hill for a community work day. We had dozens of reglazed windows to set into the Hunt barn, and we wanted to finish repairs to the little retreat hut by the waterfall in the woods on the Curtis place. A congenial crowd of us assembled for the tasks; a bunch of dogs and kids were running around; Marsha made a pot of coffee and a pot of borscht, Beth brought squash muffins; the day turned bright and cool, perfect for working; a lot got done. It is SO much more fun to do things as a bunch.

Other news — I was away for a week this month, first to San Francisco for a strategy meeting for the Packard Foundation (which wants to fund in the arena of population-environment interactions but doesn’t quite know what that might look like) and then to visit my Mom, who just had her 84th birthday in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and my uncle, who is working toward his 92nd birthday. I don’t like to travel, but I am open to invitations that allow me to drop down in Oklahoma from time to time. My uncle is physically fragile but mentally keen; my Mom is a rock of Gibraltar and a laugh a minute. I took her to the public library and introduced her to the Worldwide Web.

On the way home I met up at the Boston airport with my dear friend Joan Davis (who lives in Zurich) and brought her home for her first visit ever to Foundation Farm — so strange, since I’ve been at her house so many times. She knew it was now or never. We only had a day together, but it turned out to be the most gorgeous day of the entire year. The leaves were at their outrageous peak of color. The sun was warm and bright, the breeze benign. Indian summer at its most perfect. We toured both farms, and I’m sure I blew Joan’s mind with the complexity and pace of my life. I hope I also blew it with the beauty and excitement of my life. Anyhow, it’s always so good to be with her, and it was wonderful that I could share my world with her.

Brand-new news! Chrissie and Scot, who lived here for three years, and who are very dear to all of us, have just, day before yesterday, had a baby! It’s a girl, she arrived extremely efficiently and a week early, and everyone is fine. Scot called us, sounding a little dazed, yesterday. He’s hoping to deliver his other baby — his PhD. thesis — sometime next spring.

* * *

Stephen and Kerry and Amanda and Michael and I just had a meeting and made a list of everything we have to do to move, with a rough schedule and a division of responsibility. The very process has soothed my orderly and worried mind. We’ll make it somehow. And if we don’t quite, Jim will be staying in the house with some of his friends until Scrib and Susan and their family move in next May. So we can still transfer things all winter, if necessary, and I can still transplant things next spring.

Off we go. Wish us luck. It’s going to be quite a month!

Love,

Dana