Oh, it's been a while.
A new year, and many changes, a few of which I'm not quite ready to say out loud yet. Suffice it to say that we've been back on the island since mid December, and we're smitten. (Again.) For so many reasons. Not the least of which is the beautiful snow we've had in the past few days, which is slated to be rained away later today, last I checked.
Today, D is up at work for a few hours while I sit with grits and a mug of hot tea fighting off the worst bladder infection I've ever had. Trying to drink + cranberry it away = bad idea. Really, really bad idea.

Soon, a road trip back East. Soon, so many good things. 2012, I'm happy you're here.

Sweet potato soup and a day of Spring (Fall) cleaning; my folks and grandmother are spending the weekend at the farm and I need to carve a third bedroom out of our small, improvised office. The season mostly wrapped up, I'm using the occassion to pile nine months- three years worth of files into totes and haul it upstairs, to one of the only two closets in the house. We're making progress, but it's slow. Luckily, my family have a five hour drive ahead of them; I've got time.

I've also, I hope, got time to make my mother a cake of some yet-to-be-determined sort, and to make copious use of streamers and balloons. Her 60th birthday was a few days ago. My mother never missed a birthday of my brother or mine, to cover the house in streamers and balloons after we went to sleep and again before she went to work, for us to get off the school bus, decorations strewn in the trees at the bottom of our long, long driveway; it is an important tradition.

Soup is no more, back to that third bedroom.

Google translating Cuban poetry from a battered soft cover copy of a text published when I was seven, bought in a sticky, bustling, diesel scented market in Havana; the most beautiful cover.

Pasting to preserve my typing:

Midwestern lawyer
the same mediocre lawyer
author of fifteen volumes of poetry
novels and
plays and essays
all of little value today
except the first anthology
Spoon River
one of the best books ever written that no man
never in any language
this type of work do some crazy nobody knows
Pro
not for fame
or money
or to worship anyone or anything
but in a natural way:
suchas child that smeared a wall,
an old man reading a newspaper in the sun
or the baker kneads the bread of the poor
each early morning of god

Dear everyone: Be good to each other. Conjure happiness (not just for yourself, but for others as well). Don't send me thoughtless centre-of-the-universe emails, they might just be the first thing I read in the morning, and then I'll remember that you're an asshole for the rest of your existence. It's just one stream of bad energy against you, but do you really need that?

No? No.

Drglffffgachtljasfkddd.

Dear today: Be nice, please. Please?

Two scenes from a (hazy) happy weekend:

I love these people. This place.

A fantastic night, and a Sunday spent in pajamas and bedhead. A concert in a barn. Too much to drink, in wool socks on hay-covered wood floors. A party in the back of the farm van, on cushions, with bottles of wine and whiskey, and homemade pizza for the parking attendants. Old friends. New friends. This farming community, even in its wider radius, is a beautiful thing. We are so lucky.

Today, the two of us in our pajamas on the sofa, lying in a pile and watching dvds. A break for cookie making.

Now he works on the goat house, while I restore some order to ours. I wish Monday was more weekend.

A beautiful night with parts of the crew and scattegories. And copious booze. And a cold pool. The first time in a while that I've found my way to bed after two.

Texts from a friend at Sasquatch, breaking my heart by naming off current acts.

Chapped lips and dirty hair. Today is going to be one for staying in. For improper clothes. For multiple small meals all day long. For books and the handmade quilt on our sofa. For strong coffee drowned in cream.

All of these things sound perfect right now.

Tomorrow, I make the farm a not-for-profit. Another thing that sounds perfect. Let's hope that it is.

Dark greens, raw milk, and an afternoon of birdsong and fresh, warm air. Yes, please.

It's been a difficult week. Coupled conveniently with monthly shifts in brain chemistry, the past couple of days I could have done without.

Up until last night, when he and I had a cookout on the wood stove on our porch. Cracking open a jar of last season's pickled carrots, and snapping deadwood off the willow tree next to our house to use as roasting sticks. Watching the light drain out, in a pile on the floor, until the mosquitoes came.

I am envious of the folks who get long weekends. Scheduled reprieve, written in stone. Untouchable. In the Summer, no less. It's been long enough now that, thinking about it the other day I realized that I associated such things with being in University. With being a kid. It's easier that way, I do think.

Tomorrow we figure out how to fight for a spot in a market that's decided it doesn't need any more small organic farmers. (One, btw, is apparently the magic number- and it's not b/c that farm doesn't want us there.) I start working my way through the 13 page offer to proceed that we got last week (yay, costsharing! yay, honey extractor, and books, and infastructure and a vaguely frightening number of other things). We give the go-ahead to our C&E intern to create a non profit for us. And we plant, plant, plant, plant, plant (plant, plant).

But for now, I need a beer.

Baking in our tiny kitchen last night, two of us, while he serenaded the room with his guitar. In bed at midnight, they, up at 6:30 to harvest greens and fiddleheads, while I snuck an extra hour of sleep. She is such a lucky thing to have found. At 20, so committed. I've missed waking to a house that smells this delicious.

The first market is this morning, in 30 minutes. Rain is forecasted all day. Still, in the park near the river, I'm excited to make up a thermos of tea and spend it there with friends.

An aside: hearing myself be called/considered "older" by this new generation of conscious kids is still a trip. What a deceptively accelerated time, the mid & late 20's. A few years ago I was a kid, now I'm an adult. The line is not blurred- but where did it come from.

Okay, coffee and getting out the door. Happy Saturday, folks.

Holy cold. Day five and I've mustered up the strength to wear real pants and tidy the house. Feed myself things. Not sleep for 16 hours. Of these I am happy. Last night I was more miserable than I remember being with a cold since I was in grade school.
This aside, it's sunny as all out there, and this evening, I got this text. Life is a-ok.
PS: That's organic turkey litter he's referring to.

I have been sick socks for days and days. Time is up, for it to be over, I'd say. Payback for not getting sick all Winter?

I want nothing more than a box of cereal to eat for the next three meals, but the interns are picking up our groceries when they go out for theirs, and I, red nosed and pajama clad, have to set a good example. Cereal, in Canada, is disturbingly overpriced; it's not in their budget, it shouldn't be in mine. Welcome to farm life.

Speaking of farm life, I have good feelings about this years' crew; I have good feelings about this year. It's a happy thing.

Less of a happy thing is all of this wet and cold. Dear Spring, don't you know we need you?

And that's the sort of post you get from me when I haven't washed my hair in three days. End.

Also: Last weekend we visited the local goat dairy, thinking of getting a couple for ourselves, as the failed vegans that we are. Low light (inside a huge barn in light of new babies and mid-April snow!?), and total distraction at the hands of herds of baby goats (!!) meant mostly blurry shots, but I like this guy (and because you probably weren't at your neighbour's goat dairy last weekend, I'll share it):

A post I just put on the farm blog:

I learned of this project (click) a couple of years ago, but bumped into it again today, and was reminded of the Earth Day post we did a couple of years ago about the Pacific Garbage Patch because the two are in no way unrelated. Chris Jordan traveled to Midway Atoll in 2009 to photograph the effects of the Pacific Garbage Gyre on the Albatross populations there, specifically the chicks who, 2000 miles from the nearest continent, are fed remnants of our poorly discarded plastic by their parents who mistake it for food. The photos (click) here, speak for themselves.

On the eve of Earth Day, these lead me to reflect upon the largely unseen, but no less profound, impact even those of us with the best of intentions have on this planet of ours.

It also brings into question the things we, like the foraging Albatross, mistake as food, but that's another post altogether..

To a lifetime of consciously- and continually- stepping up our efforts, and to putting our energies behind the things we believe in.

To Earth Day, folks.

Six sets of hands here to help us these days; the two of us make eight. Two more interns arrive before the start of May. And we may be taking on a young cook once school is out. It's officially the new season in these parts.

This morning, it's tea and pajamas and a rug covered in stacks of photocopies. A (very) Rustic Guide to Farming, V.1. A workbook of sorts for the kids, times six, one page at a time. I think they're about 50 pages each.

Yesterday we visited an elderly neighbour who had a deep freeze for us in his basement. His kitchen and livingroom were lined at the ceiling with all of the blue and red ribbons he had won in the past from farming. A small garage had been converted into a chicken coop, and he had built a couple of small stalls in his walkout basement for chicks he was raising. It was perfect.

Oh, tofurkey, how I have missed you. We've pretty well given up all processed foods around here. The occasional box of cereal. Loaf of store bread. Chocolate bar. Bag of pasta. Everything else is single- or logical- ingredient(s). But on a visit to the GTA, the grocery store we picked up a helium balloon for our three-year-old niece in greeted us with the novelty that is good sandwich "meat". And with heavy spicy mustard on crusty buns, I have been enjoying it. If my stomach would allow it, I would probably have eaten it all by now, a sandwich for every meal. Oops?

I've been picking away all day at prep for our new interns. Two of them arrive within the next week. We're trying to decide to hire a fifth or not. And another email from a wwoofer rolled in this afternoon, asking if we'd like help starting this weekend. Putting together their binders, writing policy, making support materials, small assignments, etc for them, it's just now occured to me how strange my life is. I round up the kids (still v. close to being peers) whom I (we) respect the most, and then I invite them to come live with us for six months, with a handful of other peers who share the same drive +idealism + goodness.

I remember when I was about 19, coming out of small town USA, moving to the suburbs of one of the most forward thinking cities in Canada, reading about a little village on the edge of the sea, where you could come live, and surf, and squat, for free, as long as you helped out. For free?! Coming from a Republican heartland, I remember thinking this must be the most beautiful, perfect thing I'd ever heard.

19 year-old me would be proud of 29 year-old me.

Differently, I really want to play in clay. I really need a pottery wheel.

Rain and mgmt. And notebooks and forms. And a clean kitchen and a camera.

Today I hallucinated a donkey into the yard.

Last night we had a crazy snowstorm. Snowspat? It didn't last long, but it came out of nowhere, under a big clap of thunder, and managed to re-cover the ground in white in a matter of minutes. I'm not complaining; I look forward to warmth, but I immediately miss the nighttime light that snow provides. Walking back from the barn the other night it took me a while to figure out what was so different; where such dark came from.

Hello.

A clean kitchen, the last stick of incense, a pinapple and banana smoothie, the new Dadant catalog, Rumi, and the closely impending weekend (well, we're at the transition [our town name here] festival Saturday,but there's a bottle of whiskey and the best of folks lined up for tomorrow night;
it's near enough for me).Also: I am fully blissed out on Vampire Weekend's Contra. I know, right? Oops.D & I rented a car and ran away for my birthday earlier this week. A random town chosen on a map based on it's name and proximity to a freshwater coast turned out not to be a town at all, but rather a house at the end of an uninhabited 4k long single lane road. No room to turn around, equal parts of ice, sinky mud, slush, and bare dirt, hill after hill after sharp corner after sharp corner, bordered on either side by small trees, marsh, or snowbanks. The rental car had full coverage.
I giggled like a six year old while trying not to get stuck. In the middle of nowhere. It was lovely.

My stomach has been broken for two days now. Eating nothing acidic (all the joy is acidic!), and nursing the shit out of it, I quietly mope at the thought of everyone else having a beer or baking a tray of (warm, gooey, delicious) cookies. And then, the second it's better, all I can think of is breaking it again in the form of coffee. Oh.

Instead, buckwheat crepes. And water. Like someone with a memory slightly better than a goldfish.

Looking out the window after waking up this morning, I could see the ground. We were away for the great thaw that was the new year. It's been months. I have mixed feelings about this. High hopes, but mixed feelings.

I'm getting more used to the idea of being the organic farmers who go to the only diner in the nearest (two-blocks-squared) town and order a lunch of french fries, pie with ice cream, and tea. I used to think we needed to set an example. Now I think we're human, and sometimes we like ice cream for lunch. Tell me you don't.
Of course, what the small town doesn't know is that we've also been participating in self-imposed cooking classes all week. Yesterday was teamwork Wednesday, tonight is mine. The problem with running a small farm, you see, is that by the time dinner rolls around, you have neither time nor energy to make it. So you have pasta. Or cereal. Or cinnamon toast. (Okay, maybe it's not usually that bleak, maybe there usually is some chopping of fresh things, but you get the idea: we eat a lot of simple things over and over and over again.) But not this week. No, this week we've been alternating nights, and every night we've eaten like kings. Or at least like people who aren't trying to give themselves scurvy. I think it might be a new standing challenge. Tonight: rapini.

Which reminds me, I need to order the final bit of our seeds. Melons and eggplant, another variety of carrot, quinoa and amaranth, probably a couple other things I jotted down and no longer remember. The seedlings in our grow room look all sorts of happy; it's very exciting. Also exciting is the brick fireplace A is building in the hoophouse as we speak. It will have a flat, open top to boil syrup down on. Right now we are boiling on a propane stove, and the fireplace that's on the main floor of the barn. The propane stove goes as soon as his fireplace is finished. I love this mud/maple season. So much.
Even if, as we speak, my toes are still frozen from hiking out to check on our bees and take a look at the new hoophouse frame. I can't seem to remember to wear proper boots when we stop in at that side of the property lately; it's always on the way from somewhere else. Somewhere with sidewalks. Somewhere that lets me wear shoes made of thin cotton when there's still knee deep snow in some places. My mother always hated that. I'm glad that she didn't get to see me sink to my knees and trip when I was running back from the apiary. Although she would have had a good laugh. I sure did, especially when I didn't want to catch myself with my ungloved hands, so I used my elbows instead.

Now you know, internet; I hope your day is at least as graceful.

This was last weekend, but this one felt exactly the same. Happy.
And now: an open-faced sourdough/sundried tomato/fresh dill/goats cheese sandwich, with tomato sauce and honey. (And then heading over to the barn to play with friends.)
Yum. (To both.)