Dear Folks, It’s Saturday night, the end of a balmy, hazy, calm, blessed Indian summer week.  Foundation Farm was busy all day taking advantage of the nice weather to knock items off our fall chore list.  Don oiled up the garden tools and put them away and worked on getting the snowblower set up and running.  I mixed up three 50-lb bags of potting soil for starting seeds all winter.  Anna and I took down tomato stakes and bean poles and pretty well cleaned up the garden (though there’s lots of food out there still — carrots, rutabagas, turnips, leeks, kale, Brussels sprouts, salad greens of various sorts).  We pruned grapes and cleaned up the tangle in the raspberry patch.  I even found enough flowers to make bouquets for the house — late gloriosa daisies, calendula, pansies, and Johnny-jump-ups.

John Zimmer, who used to live here and now lives across town with his daughter Brenna, was here all day rebuilding part of our back porch that has rotted under the influence of drips and backsplashes from the roof.  We think we’ve fixed the problem now.  I’ve given John, who’s an accomplished carpenter, a long list of nasty projects like that.  The first was to prop up and finish our tractor shed.  He works on them as he gets a chance, which is seldom, just about at the rate I can afford to pay him.  Slowly, slowly, we’re fixing up lots of problems that have gone untended around here for a long time.  Makes me feel good.

Though it’s 8 pm as I write, the industriousness continues.  I just heard pounding down in the basement workshop and went down to investigate.  Anna is painting a slat she has cut to hold in a storm window.  Richard Harris, who is visiting with his boys this weekend, is wiring in some new basement lights — he says it’s too dim down there to work.  Jake, Richard’s younger son, has scooped up some wood scraps and is busily nailing them into a “sculpture.”  (He says he won’t tell me the title of it until it’s finished.)   Sylvia, Don, and Heather have gone out for grocery shopping and dinner with Sylvia’s mother, who’s also visiting for the weekend.  And I’m sitting in my study, playing Schubert on my CD player and writing this newsletter.  Not much moss growing on this household this weekend.

I wish you could have seen the light of the westering sun this evening.  At this time of the year it blesses our west-sloping farm with a special luminescence at the end of the day.  The maple leaves are gone, but that just lets us appreciate the burnished gold of the oaks.  I think that evening light comes just to remind me not to reduce this beautiful place to a chore list — something all too easy for a workaholic like me to do.  I enjoy doing chores on a nice day like this (indeed, I look forward through six days of writing to the one sacred day when I can tangle with raspberries and shovel compost and shuck beans).  But I too seldom take time just to enjoy the farm, just to drink in the beauty of the evening, without doing anything.  Tonight I just looked at the light, for a little while.

Sylvia has acquired a gray kitten, which seems to be surviving Heather’s overenthusiastic hugs, and Basil’s bounces, and spits from the other cats.  Heather has learned to climb out of her crib, onto every table and counter, and over the barrier that used to keep her out of the “polite” and unchildproofed part of the house.  Don has been tracking deer with his bow for days — he saw four of them tonight — but hasn’t had an opportunity for a clean shot yet.  The breeding ewes have had their parade down Daniels Road and up to the barnyard, where they are waiting for their prince to come.  As soon as our old Dodge truck gets a new manifold, I’ll drive over to Concord to pick up a 3-year-old ram I’ve bought.

I’ve been away on a few short trips, in between bouts of writing and struggling with the TV station over the name of the series.  (Some day I may tell you about that.  I have to get some distance from it first.)

I spent a day at General Electric research headquarters in Schenectady, where I was a speaker at a symposium they held about the environment and its implications for corporations.  It was fascinating to see how far corporate consciousness has moved — they were talking seriously about zero discharge of toxics, and energy conservation, and exhangeable pollution permits.  (Unfortunately, they were also talking about the next generation of nuclear power plants.)  I gave a blunt speech, which was received very well.

The best part of the visit was when I ran into the researchers who work on low-energy lights.  We snuck off to their lab, and I got to see the ideas they’re working on to get more lumens per watt.  They had a great display there of all the bulbs currently on the market, plus many generations of experiments.  (One thing they’re trying to do is make fluorescent bulbs without mercury.)  I was impressed by the ingenuity that’s going into this very-much-needed industrial development.  Some day we’ll wonder how we ever put up with tungsten bulbs that drained 75 watts, when 7 watts could have given us the same light.

Last weekend I went back to Salina, Kansas, to revisit the Land Institute, where I went last May to speak at their Prairie Festival.  (If you’d like to read about the Land Institute, pick up either the November Atlantic or the November Audubon, both of which have good articles about it, with beautiful pictures.)  They were having a conference on sustainable agriculture — tomorrow I’ll start writing an LA Times piece about it.  It was hard to take time away from the book to go, but I went anyway, partly because so many of my friends were going, partly because they had assembled so many of the key figures in the field (a strongly overlapping set with my friends), and partly because I was desperately anxious to get to the middle of the nation to be near my family (about which more in a minute).

I found it a rare treat to go to a conference where I had no organizational responsibility and was not even a speaker.  All I had to do was listen and talk to good folks.  What a pleasure!  I rented a car in Wichita and got to drive up to Salina with Herb Bormann, the great ecologist of the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, and I got to drive back with Wendell Berry, who, I firmly believe, is the greatest living poet, essayist, and novelist in the world.

In between I hung out with other friends.  The best part was going out onto a piece of unplowed native prairie with Hugh Iltis, the great botanist who found the original teosinte, the progenitor of corn, in an obscure corner of Mexico, where it was still growing wild.  Hugh is a master of prairie plants.  Every two steps across what looked like a featureless expanse of dried-up grass he stopped and introduced us to side-oats grama or heather aster or tall bluestem or turkey-foot.  I haven’t had so much fun since the memorable day when Gerardo Budowski, an equal master of the tropical forest, led me tree by tree and bird by bird through a national park in Costa Rica.  Two of the greatest experiences of my life!  If only everyone could have them!

At the end of the prairie tour, Hugh insisted that we flop down on our backs and listen to the wind rustle through the dry grass and look up at the great prairie sky and just be there.  Terrific!  I urge you all to get intimately acquainted with a prairie at your earliest possible convenience.

I saw a lot of prairie the next day, when I drove all the way from Salina to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where my mother now lives.  It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed the drive immensely.  That’s something of my father in me — I like tooling around in a car in new territory.  I like the Midwest where the roads all go so nicely east-west or north-south and you can’t really get lost.  I like the big sky and long vistas.  I was, after all, brought up in prairie country (Illinois), and I felt right at home.

As I turned east toward Tulsa I watched the prairie transform itself from short-grass to tall-grass, and then little scrub cedars and oaks appeared, and by the time I got to Tahlequah, east of Tulsa, on the very edge of the Ozarks, it was forest country.  Tahlequah is the official home of the Cherokee nation.  Its street signs are in Cherokee as well as English.  My mom has just moved to a retirement community there, a large and attractive place, set in rolling hills on the edge of town.  Her sister and brother-in-law, my Aunt Helen and Uncle Edward, have lived there for 4 years.  My mother moved in last August.

I was anxious to get there, because I knew my Aunt Helen was dying.  I arrived just a few hours before the end; I wasn’t allowed to see her, but still I felt blessed to be there, with my Mom and my uncle, at that difficult time.

Mom and Helen have always seemed to me a perfect model of sisterhood.  They have been wonderful friends, always, through thick and thin — and there’s been a lot of both.   We always spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter with Helen’s family, carefully alternating their house and our house.  I have a thousand happy memories of the feasts those two ladies put on, of being out in the bustle of the kitchen  helping with the dishes, of the funny little decorations Helen would make for the table to be sure the mood was festive, of playing with my cousins Lois and Eddie.  I don’t have a single memory of Aunt Helen in which she is anything but kind and giving.  She always made me feel special and secure, enfolded in a warm, comfortable, simple, loving family — which it often wasn’t, but around her it always was.

During that first long night after I arrived in Tahlequah, waiting for the news from the hospital we knew would be coming, I was full of those memories.  I realized how much I learned of plain decency from this side of the family, how many of my deepest ideas about duty and service, love and loyalty, came from the way Helen and Mother treated each other.  I have always taken that for granted; I never really appreciated it until that long, dark night, when none of us slept and we all had a lot of praying, thinking, and remembering to do.

I have never attended a death before, and strangely enough, it reminded me of a birth.  I have never attended a human birth, either, but I’ve midwifed lots of lambs into the world, and one thing that always strikes me about that process is the intense concentration it takes, and the incredible, spontaneous, instantaneous shift of focus when the central event finally happens.

When a ewe goes into labor, my whole being becomes centered on her struggle, her body, her strength.  Nothing else in the world is happening.  I AM that ewe, for however long it takes to push that lamb into the world.  And then in the split second when the lamb finally comes out, the ewe essentially disappears.  I AM that wet little creature, shivering and sneezing, trying to find the first breath, trying to stand, trying to get the first mouthful of warm milk that will guarantee the continuation of life.  The ewe undergoes the same shift of consciousness at the same instant I do.  She forgets all about her labor and pain; she is as focused on the lamb as I am.

So, I discovered, with a death.  Nothing matters at all except the long, tough struggle to die.  Those who love the dying person may go through the motions of carrying on life, but they really can’t focus on anything except that one struggle.  Their attention is with the beloved person; they ARE that person, sharing the labor and pain as best they can.  And then, in the awe-inspiring split second when the struggle is over (as transcendent, as inexpressible as the second when the birth occurs), the whole scene changes.  Now nothing is important except the living.  Their need is paramount, their need for mourning, sharing, and loving, their simple creature comforts, which have gone neglected for awhile — and their need to put their lives back together and go on.  Everyone shifts, wordlessly, naturally, into an entirely different gear.

I was privileged to experience that full transition with my family this week.  I have never so much appreciated them as a family.  I have never understood so well what a family is for, and how strong a thing it can be.  I left Tahlequah sad, but at peace.  Everybody there will be all right.  The retirement community knew exactly what to do.  The meatloaf was pouring in.  Mother and Uncle Edward need not be lonely, unless they want to be.  Aunt Helen’s funeral service there was packed.  Knowing her, in four years there she had probably done something thoughtful for every person in the place.  I drove back under the great sky to my plane in Tulsa feeling overwhelmed with gratitutde.

Love, Dana