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.