Dear Folks, People here are saying there has NEVER been a fall as gorgeous as this one.
Right at peak leaf season, a balmy Indian summer set in, one bright day after another, for more than a week. Amazing. Anything can happen to the weather in New England in the fall, and usually does, in rapid succession, sun interrupted by generous dollops of wind, rain, sleet and sometimes snow. The two million leaf-peepers who were in Vermont on Columbus Day weekend (quadrupling Vermont’s normal population) could have reasonably expected gray skies and chilly gusts. But they were blessed, as were we all, with the most beneficent sun and the brightest colors you can imagine.
It was perfect for the Schweisfurths.
You remember the Schweisfurths, the founders of the German organic farm and food business I wrote about last month. Well, they came to spend three days with us, partly, I guess, to inspect our new farms, to which they have made a generous contribution, and partly because they read a book about a little farm in Vermont and had romantic notions about New England.
It was a bit nerve-wracking for me. These are people whose town-house looks out on the Nymphenburg palace in Munich, people who have dozens of folks cooking and cleaning and arranging things for them, people whose tastes are indulged at every moment with the finest art and the finest food — people who have both the means and the German genes to be utter perfectionists. I’m a born perfectionist with German genes myself, but with limited means and time. There are many odd corners of Foundation Farm that I would be reluctant to expose to Schweisfurth inspection, especially at the end of a busy growing season, when we have put off cleaning and straightening-up for nice snowy winter weekends.
Before they arrived I spent two weeks cleaning. Things got cleaned that have not been cleaned in living memory. I paid active attention to shower curtains, towels, and other objects I usually ignore as long as they’re serviceable, found them tattered and ugly, got new ones. Being a perfectionist, I enjoyed all this. By the time I picked and arranged bouquets — the last touch and the last garden flowers of the season — the house was glowing. I wish I could always find the time to do such careful cleaning, but of course it meant putting the rest of my life on hold.
We welcomed the Schweisfurths with a farm dinner featuring a roast leg of lamb and yellow fingerling potatoes (Russian Bananas, my favorite). I installed them in my bedroom, with a view over the garden. The next day I whisked them off for a trip to Burlington, crossing the spine of the Green Mountains on what must have been the peak color day of the season. It knocked their socks off. There is nothing more breathtaking, anywhere, than the sun hitting the sweep of the mountains with the forests all aflame, insanely celebrating the end of the growing season.
We went to Shelburne Farms, the only place I could think of that would trump the magnificence of what the Schweisfurths have in Germany. Shelburne Farms is an estate established by the Vanderbilt family about 100 years ago, now a center for environment and sustainable agriculture education. It has farm animals for kids to pet, ongoing activities for school classes, a dairy herd and cheesery, a whole-grain bakery, a wood-working shop making fine furniture from sustainably harvested local wood, an inn and restaurant and conference center and art gallery — and what I believe to be the two biggest barns in the whole world. You can see the connections and overlaps with Herrmannsdorf, the Schweisfurth enterprise in Germany. Shelburne Farms is more explicitly oriented to education (Dorothee Schweisfurth took pictures of beautiful groups of children playing on the lawns or petting the calves). Herrmannsdorf is more oriented to nutrition and health. They can inspire each other in many ways — and I think they did. Webb gave us a great tour of the farms, and Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth gave a luncheon talk with slides of Herrmannsdorf. Since I love both places, I had a great time.
I also took the Schweisfurths to the Intervale, the inner-city riverside in Burlington that Will Raap is turning into organic farms and an eco-park. I regard that as an equally inspiring place, and one that’s more relevant to the world, since there are many more neglected city dumping-places to be reclaimed than huge estates of 19th-century industrial barons. But, dazzled by Shelburne Farms, the Schweisfurths didn’t take much to the Intervale, partly because they were tired, I guess, and partly because of esthetics. A wood-burning power plant, a huge municipal composting operation, a CSA garden for 350 city families, a fulfillment house for a gardeners’ equipment catalog — these are miracles of entrepreneurship, but not so pretty as Shelburne Farms. Oh well. They enjoyed the trip anyway.
The next day we went to our new farms in Hartland, which they loved. Karl Ludwig is even more of a visionary and a dreamer than I am, and as we walked up to the high pastures and looked down on the dilapidated but serviceable barns and the prime ag soil, he could see all the possibilities I see — and more. His eyes lit up. We soared off into planning mode — that could be the dairy barn, the cheesery could go there, the orchard there, the farm stand there. I love playing that game, and he’s a master at it. (Now if I only had the kind of capital he has! We will have it, of course, slowly, over years, as we earn it. Large amounts of capital can shorten delays in the process of manifesting vision. But it’s better that we go slowly, learn, and give the feedbacks time to come home to instruct us.)
We also visited the Dartmouth organic farm and had a great talk with the students, again with slides of Herrmannsdorf. When the Schweisfurths left I was exhausted, but I really enjoyed my time with them (and their friend Peter who came with them, who manages the hundred-million-dollar arts budget of the city of Köln). Karl Ludwig is domineering, but visionary and exciting, and he has a sweet sense of humor and a deep dedication to Quality. Dorothee is a loving, spiritual, thoughtful woman and a helpful guest. Peter is good-humored, patient, funny. We had a good time together, we learn to like each other, and they seem to have adapted to the humble conditions of Foundation Farm.
Meanwhile, as Closing looms ahead of us, the new community is humming. My gosh, on December 1 we are really going to OWN those 250 acres in Hartland! That reality has moved us into a completely different phase of discussion and interaction. It’s one thing to sit around and theorize about a fictitious, idealized community. It’s another to confront spreadsheets and property tax, legal forms and loans, architects and sewage permits, and to know that the decisions you make will be cast into buildings in which you’re going to have to live and mortgages you’re going to have to pay.
Separates the grown-ups from the kids real fast. And brings out all the craziness, fears, and hang-ups of the grown-ups. None of us, in this community or any other, however grown up, is free from craziness, fears, and hang-ups. Ah, me!
We have six households ready to commit significant money to buy in their shares. We have at least four more households close to that point, having already committed huge amounts of time and responsibility, but hesitant about the final leap. (You’d think the six committed ones would be wealthier than the four more hesitant, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Some people are just a lot more foolish than others.) If those ten households all do join, we will have half the community filled, with an incredible, exciting, capable, wonderful bunch of people. (Ranging from newborn to near retirement, and including farmers, artists, teachers, computer experts, systems modelers, and an impressive array of other talents. Only 5 kids, counting one on the way — we have to get more kids.) There are many other families in the discussion, at all degrees of interest and commitment. I have a feeling that when we get our planning done and have some iron-clad cost figures, it won’t take long to fill the place up.
We agreed that everyone is strongly encouraged to express opinions, but only those who have bought in make the final decisions. (With considerable pressure, of course, to make them in a way that brings the others in.) That scheme makes sense, but this month for the first time it created a real tension. Interestingly enough, both the committed and the nearly committed were experiencing a sense of frustration over their inability to control things. Those who are on the edge feel that they’re putting in enormous amounts of time, but when push comes to shove, they have no real power. And in contrast, those on the “inside” feel that those on the edge are wielding their not-yet-committedness to make power plays. If I don’t get to keep two horses, I’m not coming in. If you don’t bring the budget in at under $100,000 per household, I’m not coming in. If I have to do any farming, I’m not coming in. Etc. Since we’ve jumped in without making any such demands, and since we’re the ones with our money on the line, we get a bit testy with that kind of talk — though it is exactly what we need to hear to design the community to attract good people.
A spat broke out on our very busy email discussion list over this issue, and that taught me the dangers of email. Normally it works great for us. I’ve even thought we should keep it even after we’re living together. It lets a person take the time to put together a long, considered response. It doesn’t let anyone interrupt anyone. It lets you go back and read what someone else said 3 times. It keeps an exact record of what you said, so you can’t be misquoted. For all those reasons, email is a great civilizing force. But it has some drawbacks. Like a verbal discussion, it lets you spit out an instant response without thinking very hard. Unlike a verbal discussion, it doesn’t let you hear tone of voice, irony, self-deprecation, or kindness. And it doesn’t let you look someone in the face and remember that they’re complex and real. It lets you make caricatures of each other.
Well, we de-escalated the problem, primarily by looking each other in the face and realizing that we really like each other and are not overtly trying to do power plays. The main trouble was that the committed ones (which we called “hotheads” until this episode; now we call them “decision partners”) are frantic with short-term necessities like getting legal papers drawn up, loans lined up, old houses fixed up and re-sold or rented, architects and design teams interviewed, spreadsheets figured out. Our focus is on what has to be accomplished before December 1, and we just don’t have time to worry about our eventual horse policy, or what the name of the community should be. That made the almost-committed (the “consulting partners”) think we didn’t care about what was uppermost in importance in their minds.
Ah, what impatient and poorly communicating fools we mortals be! Those of you who are shuddering to think of all the misunderstandings and squabbles still ahead of us — those who are thanking your lucky stars that YOU haven’t involved yourself in community — can simply contemplate the times you’ve been involved in similar mishaps in family, at work, in your neighborhood, in whatever organizations you belong to. I don’t think we have the option of avoiding community; we only have the option of learning to practice it better and better. THAT — learning and practice — is what our community is for.
The good news from this first difficult moment in our community is that I think we handled it well. We looked each other in the face, we responded to each other, we talked, we listened, we came up with the next set of experiments to try. We are coming to really, really like each other, and that’s what’s important.
Now we have a disagreement breaking out about hiring a design team and expert builders, as opposed to doing our own simple designs and building our own buildings. This is dividing the group on a cleavage line between those who have organized their lives to come from perpetual scarcity of money, those who come from perpetual scarcity of time, and those who are totally unempowered on the subject of building. (Like me, for instance. I’d be afraid to live in a building I had built!)
We could do a combination of both, of course, but we’ve seen co-housing communities where everyone expressed their individuality through their buildings, and we didn’t like the hodge-podgy result. We want a certain visual uniformity and standard of energy efficiency, though we can have household units of different sizes and elaborateness, and we need enough central planning so the whole thing make sense as a neighborhood and with the landscape. Those who want to hire a set of really good green designers, to be sure our energy use is minimized, our materials are sustainable, our water is recycled and nutrients reclaimed are going to need to spread the cost over many families rather than absorbing it all themselves.
So there we are. My guess is that we’ll probably resolve this one in favor of the professional designers (since the majority of the decision partners are more time-scarce than money-scarce), and that as a result we’ll lose some of the do-it-yourselfers. I’m staying awake nights trying to figure out a creative way of avoiding that outcome. One thing this enterprise is surely doing is testing our creativity!
Well the bright leaves are gone now, faded and piled up on the lawn, waiting for me to rake them and haul them to the garden. We’ve had some hard freezes, and as I write the first of the extended fall storms is moving in, actually threatening snow. Makes me realize how much we still have to do around here to batten down. But things are slowing down. There’s not much left in the gardens. Stephen has loaded the root cellar with carrots, potatoes, rutabagas, celeriac, turnips, leeks, cabbage, squash. Mary and I picked our own apples and wild ones and pressed 17 gallons of cider, some of which are stashed away in the freezer. (We drink them up fast — yum!) We also made many batches of wild grape jelly. I have never seen so many wild grapes as we had this year.
Chrissie is now settled into Ruth’s big house next door. Scot is still away on Vancouver Island measuring trees for his thesis research — his field season is going terrifically well, we hear. Chrissie had a big party over there last night, to celebrate the finished thesis of another biology grad student and good friend, Cam Webb. Mary is back in Virginia for a few weeks, settling her mother’s estate and packing up stuff to bring back up here. Looks like she’s going to stick around with us in this cold climate and bring her friend Don Faulkner too — Hurray!
The last veggie deliveries go out to the CSA customers this week. The last farmers market is over. The sheep are up in the barnyard, though I still have hopes of getting them out on the grass in the hayfield, if the weather doesn’t get too bad — I don’t want to feed out all my hay while we still have so many lambs. The first delivery of lambs goes to the butcher Thanksgiving week. The horses are over at a farrier friend’s place, learning to drag a stoneboat and performing well, we hear. I planted another few hundred daffodil bulbs yesterday, just before the rain moved in. We’re lighting the woodstoves as the early dark comes at night.
Time to slow down and cuddle in.
Love, Dana
