Winding Down

It is pitch dark at 7:00 in the morning. I have no choice but to sit here in my nightgown, sipping my hot yukky, and work my way through this list of unpaid balances.  When it is light out, I can escape my desk and go out to work/play.  At this time of year, work is almost like play because it feels like a form of entertainment and distraction.  It is like we have work dates.  We meet at 9 or 9:30, we do our ritual CSA tasks for a few hours, and then we disperse again.  A few people go to deliver the CSA bags, others go home, others go back to the fields to round up more radishes.

Today there is a 100% chance of rain.  I certainly remember days when it didn't rain, even with that prediction, but I made a plan for today that accommodates rain. We are not going to a market that has been declining  every week, and all the people from the Loudoun farm are coming in here to join us. This is another week of Last Days.  Yesterday was Jess's last work day, today is Jaclyn's.  We are winding down, getting down to the bare bones crew.

I am not sad but it is a melancholy time, like the end of a school year.  This group will never exist again, these people will move on and become part of our history, we will not have these spontaneous moments of laughter, we won't be together in mud-covered clothes.  Some of them will come back to form a new group, and their stories from this year will inform the next generation, but this one is disbanding.

The potlucks have been a huge addition to our culture.  In the long ago past (the 1970s), we had Community Dinners in the front yard on Wednesday and Sunday nights.  It was often dark when we gathered at the picnic table and we ate and talked late into the night. One summer, when Saroj was here, we ended every dinner singing "Good Night Irene."  Those dinners went by the wayside when we started having babies and families to tend to and we stopped housing workers at the Vienna farm.  We gave up on trying to create a community when we started hiring more commuters who went home well before dark.  Out in Loudoun in the last decade or so, they had Friday night dinners, with the small group that worked together all day and all week.

In 2014 we started doing Friday Lunches here in Vienna, religiously.  Sometimes there were four people gathered in the greenhouse, to get out of the wind and cold in April and in the middle of the summer we could have as many as 20 people at the table. This year we instituted Thursday Lunches in Loudoun, again religiously.  We do not take our potlucks lightly.  Everyone comes.  It is the moment when we are all sitting down, not working, together. 

Last year's final Friday Lunch, on the last week of markets and CSA, was in the greenhouse.  Rowan and Becky were there, and Darryl joined us.  He was so tickled to be warm on a November day and he suggested that we have every lunch there forevermore.  You never know when the last time is. I am glad he had such a good time. That was the last lunch we shared with Darryl, but the rest of us have eaten together for another 30 weeks in a row.

This community has been chugging along for over fifty years, in one form or another.  It would be really something to have a gathering of past workers and past supporters.  Maybe that is something to aspire to, just for the fun of it.  It would be the potluck of a lifetime.

Frost

Yesterday as I was driving out to Loudoun -- my Saturday morning routine after the market trucks roll out -- I noticed what a gorgeous day it was.  Crispy, clear, full of color, absolutely beautiful. And I then noticed that I was filled with joy.  This doesn't happen all the time when I am headed out to work as fast and hard as I can, mostly by myself, so I can get back in time to be here when the market trucks roll back home.  I just felt so glad about everything.

First of all, how can you feel anything but joy when the days are gorgeous and you get to be outside all day long?

Second, we have been preparing for the first frost. We are clearing every field of everything that will turn black. Everyone is tired of peppers and eggplant, the most dogged of all the plants.  They continue to produce, week after week, and the fruits are lovely, but we have had enough.  I am not tired of beans -- I am never tired of beans when they are fast and easy to pick -- but they will go down if it gets below freezing.  On Thursday they stripped all the peppers and eggplants off in Loudoun. On Friday afternoon Becky headed out to the pepper patch by herself and I headed up to the beans.  I had a feeling there would be a lot of peppers, so I texted her, "need help?" She did. From my office in the bean patch, I found her some help -- and they filled 44 baskets with purple and green and orange and red peppers of all sizes.  I stayed on my knees and kept at it with the beans. Mom came up to help, and we had 15 baskets when we had to stop to do other things.

Frost used to be the end point, back when we only grew summer-friendly crops.  But now we grow so much that can stand the cold -- it is just a punctuation mark. It ends a chapter.  We are moving ever closer to the end.

I think that is really where the feeling of joy started.  I love this work, but I also love NOT working.  And we are exactly five weeks from the last market day.

Instead of rushing home to meet the trucks yesterday, I decided to stay on my knees and pick beans out in Loudoun.  Jon has noted that the cell phone has made it possible for me to work and be other places at the same time.  I can also ask someone to bring me some lunch (I got two lunches delivered to the bean patch, so nice) and I can lure others to the beans.  By the end of the afternoon, there were five of us having a bean party, even though everyone had been working since before dawn.  Frost is a great motivator.

Being surrounded by beauty, even in this godforsaken suburban world of Northern Virginia, is a constant source of joy.  Will wonders never cease.

These blurry-edged photos are of the CSA room this morning.  Somehow I can never take a good picture of the room, but it is stunning today.

We Are At That Age

We are at the age where we go to more memorial gatherings than baby showers and more funerals than weddings.  I have already written about my feelings about funerals -- I go to them whenever I can. It is important to me to be present, in support, as a listener, to be part of honoring someone as they leave our world.  So often I learn things I had never imagined about the life story of the person who has died, or about the family, and it just adds so much to my understanding about the person. 

Today's memorial event was for a neighbor I did not know well.  When he came to Blueberry Hill, he had already suffered a traumatic brain injury a few years before, so I never knew him as his real self.  I went to the gathering out of respect for his wife, and because that is what we do here.  No matter what, we support our mourners and we mourn with them.

This man had an amazing life.  Absolutely amazing.  (His wife sent this to us: "For those that are interested, please go to the link http://www.arlingtonsistercity.com/ to see an interview with Jim about his role in the Arlington Sister City Association (ASCA). Just click the link Interview with Jim Rowland in the Popular list. Jim believed in international understanding at the grass roots level - he helped to build ASCA from its early days - he was a great host to numerous international students and had friends in many countries as a result. I think this story is interesting in and of itself and for me it also has the flavor and feel of Jim, since it was based on an oral interview.")

All of his siblings and their families were there today, as well as his ex-wife and a whole other family, plus people who must have worked with him (there were no formal introductions), plus us.   There were several themes that came through -- he was a brilliant guy who had lots of unusual ideas, many talents and skills, a quirky way about him, he loved young people, he was generous and kind, he made his siblings do all kinds of wacky things because it was entertaining, he had a flare for the bizarre, he could learn to do anything.  They didn't talk much about his brain injury, which he got in some freak mugging in McLean, never solved, but it clearly changed his life completely.  

One of our newest neighbors who has lived here for less than six months said something eloquent and touching, directly to Jim's wife.  She thanked her for modeling a kind of love that we don't appreciate or honor enough -- when times were tough, his wife stayed right by him and took care of him with devotion and respect. It was an unusual and lovely observation, and I was stunned by her clarity. 

My own experience with Jim was one of patient listening as he repeated some thoughts or ideas. I missed out on the quirky, funny, high level Jim.  We only knew the kind, open-hearted, kid-friendly man who slowly deteriorated and began to despair. 

No one gets to choose the end of the story, and that is a hard thing.  But he lived his life to the best of his abilities, and people loved him a lot.  You can't do better than that.

A Four Outfit Day -- Not Counting Nightgown

And it wasn't hot or rainy -- it was a beautiful day, almost to the very end.

First Outfit:  Jeans and T-shirt for picking radishes and arugula and chard.  Soaking wet and very muddy by 9:00 AM.

Second Outfit:  waiting for me in the kitchen because I knew I would be in a rush, a clean T-shirt and my baggy Hawaiian pants for going to the hospital to sit with Anna while Gordon had his exploratory cardiac catheter procedure.  Rushed from the parking lot, got there in time to see Gordon coming back to the recovery room in fine spirits (drugs are good). They found no blockage at all, despite his alarming stress test yesterday, and next they will do a CT scan to see what else they might learn.  The three of us chatted while we waited the two hours before Gordon was allowed to get up. 

Raced home to make fried rice for lunch, and attended the farm potluck in my unusually clean clothes.

Third Outfit:  a third T-shirt and a lightweight pair of long pants for bean picking, not clean.  Right after lunch, went out to Loudoun to join the crew in the bean patch for a bit.

Fourth Outfit:  yoga clothes that were out in the barn from the last yoga class two weeks ago.  Joined the crew for a 4:30 farm yoga class.  By the end it was raining hard and we couldn't even hear Kate giving instructions, as the water pounding on the metal roof drowned her out. 

Came home and unloaded my vehicle, sloshing through the water that filled the flooding cooler, still wearing my yoga clothes but no shoes.  Stephen came to help me and did the heavy lifting. I mostly tried to figure out where things were supposed to go.

And now I have actually returned to Outfit #2 because I thought I was going to the airport to pick up Jon, but his flight which was diverted to Richmond because of the storms is now cancelled and it is not clear when or how he is getting home.  Maybe it is time to get into my nightgown.

Waiting for Joaquin

As always, the weather is awfully hard to predict.  And there seems to be quite an industry in hyperbole and storm-chasing.  For many days the weather people have been watching the progress of a storm that has been growing into an increasingly strong hurricane.  After all these years of Septembers and Octobers, picking before the storm with a name, preparing for the worst, hoping for something less drastic, we have learned how to keep all our options open.

Ellen gets really nervous because she watches the weather reports constantly; I am less nervous as soon as I have a plan. I don't like uncertainty.  Since hurricanes create uncertainty, it seems best to be ahead of the game as much as possible.

Yesterday I decided the best strategy was to fill the coolers and wait to see what happens next.  So today the whole Loudoun crew dressed for rain and we headed out to the fields -- it had already rained over four inches so everything was soft and mushy and trucks were out of the question.  All morning long a light misty drizzle fell on us.  We picked about five golf cart loads of kale (about 40 crates) and then moved on to the broccoli and cauliflower and radishes and celeriac.  By about 10:30 I was getting cold since my socks were soaked inside the boots.  We stopped to get warmed up, change our socks and have some hot chocolate.  Then back out for another couple of hours in the chard and beets and herbs and celeriac. It was a very good morning.  Everyone stayed cheerful the entire time.

We had the best potluck lunch ever (all potluck lunches are just about the best ever, but today's was especially good) and we spent some time on a "check-in" --
Shua had told me that he wished we had more conversations that allowed us to get to know each other better.  So we sort of had a hybrid question of "if you knew me well, you would know that..." and "tell us about a body part that is particularly interesting to you, and why."  We learned about Shua's childhood of hand massages, Ellen's obsession with feet, Hannah's interest in what it would be like to be a tall person with long legs... it was fun.

Some people headed back out into the rain for peppers and eggplant, and three of us stayed in the barn to wash the mountains of food we had collected up.  Ecole did the inventory -- we picked 150 crates of leafy stuff.  We still don't know which markets we will go to, but the reports are getting less dire and we might end up at four out of five of our weekend markets.

Meanwhile, because wisdom comes from experience, Ellen went out to make sure the drain pipe in the pond wasn't clogged so that the water wouldn't run over the dam.  She put on her waders and took someone with her to make sure she didn't get swept away or chewed on by a snapping turtle.

We loaded one Sprinter to the ceiling, front to back, with only crates.  Then we backed the new Sprinter up to the door and filled it about halfway.  Hannah and I drove 45 minutes back to Vienna and parked the vans behind the stand and left them to be unloaded tomorrow. I was too wet and cold to face all that sorting and rearranging. 

So now we wait to see whether the hurricane comes closer or turns back out to sea.  At one time they were predicting 6 - 12" of rain (I ignored that) and now it is down to 2 - 4" (still more than we need).  I feel much better with all that nice clean kale stacked up in the truck.  We have choices, and that's how we like it.