He's a Lumberjack and He's Still Okay

I married someone who is, in some ways, even more frugal than my own parents. This is a low bar -- or a high bar depending on how you think of frugality. This characteristic reveals itself most when it comes to energy consumption, so we can call it a high bar, in this case.

When my family moved to the farm in 1970, that was the official beginning of the wood stove phase of our lives.  Our one story house had an oil furnace but our real heat source was an Ashley stove -- a wood stove with a metal cover around it so it looked more like a box and not like a real stove. You couldn't burn yourself by touching it.  After the house burned down in 1974 (due to a crack in the clay collar that held the stove pipe as it went through the wall), my parents renewed their commitment to wood heat.  When we rebuilt the house, they built a giant chimney right in the middle of the kitchen, one with several flues and a big fireplace. One of the flues was for the Mexican water heater that Dad installed just to the left of the fireplace.  When we needed hot water, we had to build a fire in the little fire box at the bottom, and then we had to wait a while. At one point we were four teenagers in that house.  I doubt we took as many showers as most teenagers.

Okay, I take it back. Jon is not quite as extreme as my father was. Our water heater runs on electricity. But it is set pretty low, and in the summer it uses the heat that comes out of the geothermal well.

When Jon and I moved out of DC and into our first house as a married couple, we went to the most rustic end of the spectrum possible in Fairfax County.  No heat source, but there was a well and there was electricity.  We rented a little two story house that had been moved to the middle of an old dairy farm, and in the process of moving, somehow it had slipped off the wheels and got a little bent.  So the house was charmingly unlevel and leaky, but the roof was good. There was a woodlot right out back and Jon began his new career as a wood chopper. 

He has been cutting and splitting and hauling wood for 32 years, and we have had a wood stove in all three of our houses.(So, in terms of sheer longevity, he wins. My dad only lasted 14 years as a wood heat specialist, although I am sure that had nothing to do with his early demise.) I am vigilant about the safety issues, having already lived through one house fire.  Jon thinks I am over-cautious, but there is no such thing.

This stove is not as high tech as the one we had on Utterback Store Road. That one had a catalytic converter and was engineered to burn hot and slow all night. This house was designed without those issues in mind (size of stove needed for that sort of behavior), so we had to downsize our stove and our expectations.  We make do.  In fact, one of the main reasons we chose this house site -- one that is far less aesthetically pleasing and interesting than many of the others -- is that we knew that hauling firewood would be a priority and we sure didn't want to haul it down the Greenway. We were right.

Last year I was tempted to write about Jon's escapades in the woods, hauling logs down a steep hill and across a stream, but the stories might have alarmed Lilah, and I never told them.  Let's just say Jon is not as cautious as I am about driving equipment, crossing waterways, getting stuck, etc.  On more than one occasion he had to call to ask me to get the tractor so I could pull the loader out of the mud. The last time I told him we were not doing that again. It was just crazy. 

We have finally hit a serious cold snap here, and our wood stove is chugging along.  It isn't doing all the work of heating our house (we have our geothermal unit to  back us up, and our solar panels don't you know) but it is making a big dent in our energy bill.

Yesterday, for the first time that I can remember, we cooked all of our meals on the wood stove, just because we could. We had eggs for breakfast (the easiest and quickest thing to cook) and I made a big pot of lentil soup which came out just fine, so simple, and I even made tapioca because Anna was coming over for dinner. We have this widget that gives us a reading on temperature (air, water, anything) so Jon could entertain himself by figuring out where the hottest surfaces were on the stove.  Then he estimated how that compared to the electric stove. He was just making stuff up.

I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure we are in a teeny tiny minority, cooking on a wood stove in this super rich county.  It's just one more way that we get to hone our resilience skills -- by being creative with our frugality.  I am waiting for the water to boil so I can make some oatmeal, but I think it's just evaporating away, now that I notice what is really happening.  Always more to learn. Jon has to explain relative humidity to me about three times a year, and I understand it until we get to another season and then I have to ask again.  Somehow this is related to the fact that my oatmeal water is not boiling, I think. But maybe not.

A Quiet Departure

Less than a week ago, I wondered how long my mother-in-law would be here.  And even though it was predicted and anticipated that her time would be short, it is still amazing how quickly she went.  She left her affairs in order -- asking her bookkeeper and friend to come over to make sure her annual donations were sent. She sent notes to the various in-house entities that were expecting her to come and help with this or that: she told them not to expect her as she would not be around much longer.  Direct and unsentimental and so reliable, as I said before.  By Thursday it was clearly time for her to make her retreat downstairs to the nursing center, where Leon had lived for four years. 

Lilah spent four days down there.  When she arrived, she greeted everyone warmly and was received by nurses who remembered her from those long years.  On Friday morning she had her last conversation, on the phone with Sarita in California, and then she dozed off and stayed asleep for the rest of her days. Family members stayed with her, talking, visiting with each other, sitting quietly.  There was an empty bed in the room, and each night she had a new roommate: her daughter Dena, then her granddaughter Rebecca, and then her son Jon.  She slept quietly, they slept less soundly, alert to their watchful role. I arrived late on Sunday night and went to see my sleeping mother-in-law. She was beautiful.  I had not seen her so striking before, except in pictures.  Somehow her face had melted into a youthful, smooth, bony version of Lilah. Utterly lovely. And so much like her daughters.

On Monday morning, today, her children felt that things had finally shifted.  And, indeed, in the late morning Sue and Dena and Steve were with her and felt that it was time to gather the siblings.  Within minutes all of her children were around her. And she was quiet, with no more breath.  Sarita sang the Shema. And we were quiet as we waited to see if she would breathe again.

Today was not a demanding day but it seems incredible that this is the same day that Lilah died.  It is the first day for as long as I can remember that I did not go out of doors until nighttime. Sue and Dena took care of decisions and details, creating a path forward for the next few days.  They are following the same general path the Lilah chose when Leon died -- very private, immediate family only, with a shiva here at Brookhaven for anyone who would like to come.

It is too early for me to wrap this story up, but I want to remember the feeling of calm and peace and the lack of wrenching grief.  There have been tears and there will be more. But she said it herself, she had a good life, she was lucky. And she lived in a place where people come to live until they die, so all the steps are handled with dignity and care.  People say the right things, kindly.  They treat all of this as a normal series of events.  They don't rush. It is the most supportive environment ever for dying. The family is comforted, just being here. We are in a timeless bubble for a couple of days, and no one is pushing us anywhere. 

When Sarita stepped out into the hallway to tell the cleaning ladies about her mom (it was her job partly because she is a Spanish speaker), they expressed such sorrow. They have known her for eight years and have appreciated her kindness and the notes she left for them, written in Spanish.

Tomorrow we will begin the process of making decisions about the physical stuff that is left behind, and we will meet with the rabbi and we will talk some more.  All of this will help to make it more real.  But Lilah set the tone, with grace and gratitude, and we will follow her lead.

This Moment, Right Now, is Precious

The original mission of this blog was to provide another way for my mother-in-law to be able to see something about our lives, without having to do anything but get on her computer. Now I am not sure she does get on her computer anymore, and the audience for this has not grown much past my family and a few close friends. But, as anyone near me knows, I do my best thinking when I am writing or talking, so this blog was of course for me as much as it was for Lilah. It will continue on without her but it will still be written with her in mind. I like writing for 90 year olds -- they appreciate everything and they are not super critical.  In Lilah's case, she is not critical at all of me or what I write.

Just in case you have not been part of the daily news cycle in our family, we are in a whole new place with Lilah's health and future.  A week ago everyone thought she would have surgery next week to remove something that was growing and getting to be problematic.  Details not important.  But in the last five days or so, things have changed drastically and Lilah is soon to be in the care of the hospice team that works with her residential community.

I just got off the phone with Dena -- she is staying with her mom for the week, helping to navigate the new realities and just being a very helpful and understanding presence.  We are all lucky that Dena has taken the role of caregiver of emotions, if we can put it that way.  In any case, it is not by chance that Dena is the one who is hanging out with Lilah this week (no one knows what next week will bring, but Jon is planning to be there).  She feels lucky to be with their mom, and we are lucky that she is there. For years Sue has done all the work of being the closest sibling, living just a half mile away and always taking care of every single logistical detail and communication. No one can imagine all that Sue has done.  Dena has been the one who makes sure to call every day and stay in touch from a distance.  Those two have taken these roles with grace and patience, and the rest of us should remember that always.

Anyway, in the course of that conversation I learned more about what I think, in addition to hearing how things are going.  Here is what I think:  we are all so blessed that Lilah has the biological and emotional fortitude that she has. While she may be forgetting some things (it would be wild and unbelievable if she weren't forgetting some things), she has never not once not ever forgotten who she is or how she fits in.  She has been a rock, in so many ways that we have never even noticed.  She is reliably Lilah, every step of the way. This is so important for the rest of us. We have not had to adjust to a new personality as she has gotten older and less able. She has been gracious, calm, caring, strong.  So strong.  Throughout all the challenges of being Leon's partner as he declined and lost hold of his own essence, she has maintained her essence every moment.  Certainly there have been times of distress or uncertainty. Certainly there have been times when she didn't know what to do. But she has never scared us by becoming too anxious to cope or showing flashes of anger or anything that would be a surprise.  We have relied on her and she has been entirely reliable, as our mother and grandmother and mother-in-law.

This family is not particularly demonstrative or direct when it comes to feelings.  I shouldn't speak with such generality -- Jon's youngest sister has been both demonstrative and direct about her feelings for many years, and we appreciate that very much. But, overall, it is a family that works things through together, appreciates every member of the group, makes time to gather together, and then talks about sports or trivia or national news.  We have been getting better at expressing our feelings, now that we have had more practice, with Leon's passing and all that came with that.

This moment, this moment right now, is a gift to every single one of us. Lilah is still present and able to listen and speak. She is at home.  She sleeps in her own bed, she gets out of a chair without help, she reads the newspaper at her table.  But this moment is fleeting. Of course all of life is fleeting, but this time it is extremely powerfully fleeting. In less than a week she is likely to be in the nursing care center.  Who can say how long she will be with us as she is today. This is our opportunity, right now, to make sure that we express to her how much she means to us.

Tears are flowing down my face as I write this.  Of course I am grateful that she has had a good life, a life of love, including a perfectly lived marriage of over 60 years, and work and family and even a fine retirement in a comfortable home. And it is hard to express how grateful I am that she will not suffer as she gets closer to death.  Because of all the choices she has made up until now, and the choices her children have made on her behalf, she will have the chance to have a good death.  This is such a gift. It is hard to imagine, right now, the world without her.  It is always hard to imagine that.  But we know, from long experience, that we will think of her always and she will be a part of who we are forever. We have depended on her and we will continue to depend on her -- it will just be up to us to keep her memory alive and relevant.  As we know, memory can be tricky. This is my own promise to Lilah: I will make sure that we remember you accurately and continue to learn from what you have taught us.

This is a hard moment, as precious as it is.

Taking Stock

On my phone, there is a place to go and find out where specific family members are, in real life, right now. I haven't really used it yet but other people in our family do it all the time.  In fact, just a half an hour ago I see that Rebecca sent a message to the five of us:  "We can't find Benjamin." 

There is no reason for alarm, but the girls were probably poking around looking to see if he was back at home in Haifa yet. He left yesterday afternoon, so he must be there by now and his battery must be dead.  (Jon just commented: "Maybe he's at that Five Guys" as the last time we can see Benjamin's location is at Dulles, very close to that restaurant. I chuckled.)

Just an hour ago, Anna picked up the girls and took them to Dulles so they could resume their normal lives in Boston. Those were the last Groissers to leave the house -- Jon left for Shreveport yesterday morning -- and now I have four days of quiet ahead.  I already know that my days will be full, but they won't be full of vegetable wrangling, and that is a huge shift in focus.

It takes me absolutely no time to shift into non-farm mode. You would think there would be some whiplash, after the steady pace and intensity of the last many months. But, nope, I have been here before and I am already looking at my cluttered house with off-season eyes. I could really use a dumpster in the front yard.

This winter the farm will not completely release its grip on us, but it will not be our only source of entertainment.  There will be someone working on picking and selling vegetables all winter long, so the conversation won't go away. I hope to keep my distance from the day-to-day work but I already know that I will be needed in various ways as we navigate new relationships and roles (we have a new farmer joining us...lots of challenges ahead).

Benjamin was here for nearly three months, after being away for more than three years (except for visits for weddings), and he settled right back into the household without ruffling anything. The weddings and family gatherings have been frequent enough that he can still have projects lying around.  He has a never-ending list of things he wants to make or fix or learn, and he only manages to get about two of them done on any particular visit.  This time he had to write a paper for school that just took forever -- it ate up well over a month, with much gnashing of teeth.  But as soon as that was done he could dive back into his world of metal and wood.  Benjamin gets the most of anyone out of the shop resources that are available at the barn, which is pretty funny since he lives on the other side of the world.  He made a mandolin that came out very well, and now he knows what he would do differently next time. And then he spent about a week learning to make a kitchen knife from a piece of steel that he ordered from Amazon.  Lots of learning there, and we have a big scorch mark on our kitchen floor from the early phases when he was using the stove for heat, before he built a forge outside the barn. In the end, he said the handle was what gave him the most trouble, as he kept breaking it when he tried to bend it just a little too much, since wood has completely different properties from metal.  Both the knife and the mandolin are quite beautiful.

When he left yesterday, I felt the same tearing of a mother's heart that I always feel when he leaves on  his adventures. We have all had a lot of practice, saying goodbye to Benjamin, and we are determinedly unsentimental, as a group, but it takes me a few days to recover.

Ah, my phone just dinged  From Benjamin:  "Hey guys I'm back on the map."  Alissa replied with a photo of herself and Rebecca, smiling and groggy, waiting for their plane.  And Jon called a minute ago to tell me to get some parts ready for the mechanic this morning. All are accounted for.  Not present, but where they should be. 

Virginia Is Growing Blue Spots

Sometimes people say that Virginia is a purple state, but it really isn't.  It sounds good to say that we have a blend of opinions but it is basically not true. After Tuesday's election, the map showed that the areas of most density, more urban and suburban, those are the ones that are getting more blue all the time.  When we first moved out to Virginia, we felt like the only Democrats.  But times have changed. Northern Virginia is now full of immigrants and progressives who vote, and we are overwhelming the rest of the state, with the help of urban centers with big universities.

Usually I don't do anything political, except by being part of a longstanding farm business that lives by some strong principles. And we have taken to putting big in-your-face sized signs at the entrance of our driveway during elections.

But last year's presidential election showed me that we can't let that happen again. This year, like so many other formerly inactive people, I joined the ranks of the active.  I was late to the game, as vegetables can be very demanding, but I did make it a priority to do something real this time around.

For a good five years or so, I have been part of a non-partisan, interfaith community organizing group. This group (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement)  takes the long view, spending a lot of energy and time on building relationships and creating connections between elected officials and clergy, mostly.  It takes a lot of patience and faith to keep going to the meetings because things seem to move at a glacial pace. Also, the jargon can be off-putting, and I think they miss a lot of opportunities to collect up some good minds and hearts by using words that don't mean what they think they mean.  We once spent a whole meeting talking about our goal of "agitating" people.  There were plenty of people in the room who didn't like that word, and didn't want to let the conversation progress until they had made their discomfort very clear.

So, this non-partisan group decided to focus on the governor's race in Virginia this year and they put all their energy into finding out what the most important issues were so we could tell the candidates what VOICE has identified as key goals.  They taught people how to facilitate conversations and they held thousands of meetings to find out what was troubling people the most.  I am not entirely certain that they didn't have the final list in mind before they even started having all the conversations -- they didn't come up with anything earth-shattering -- but the conversations were really the point, not the issues.  They were moving toward this one big event where they invited both candidates to come and hear our list of demands, based on 5000 conversations.

Even though it was the middle of October and still a very busy time for farmers, I had committed to be there for that meeting (so had my mother and Michael Lipsky who are also engaged in this) and to bring as many people as possible.  The VOICE strategy is to get public commitments from each institution (church, mosque, synagogue) for the number of people they will bring to these big "actions." Our temple had said it would bring 85, which was a stretch. I was shameless, of course, and asked my sister to come because Julia and the baby were coming, and so on. It took a lot of reminding and asking, but we did get our numbers. And on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in the middle of nowhere (a high school in Nokesville), there were 1500+ people in a big auditorium participating in this bit of political theater.

It was the most tightly-run example that I have seen in five years.  Usually they spend too much time with the pep rally aspects, but they were on a tight schedule and they stayed with it.  We heard brief stories from people who had specific examples of bullying in schools, bad experiences with guns, fears of getting sent back to a country they had never lived in, students who couldn't observe their religious holidays if they weren't Christian, etc.  And we watched VOICE clergy members asking direct questions of both candidates, using the exact same words for each one. There was no cheering, no signage, no partisan behavior. It was actually really good.

VOICE has this entirely predictable and persistent way of getting commitments out of people and I signed a card saying I would do some thing real, like canvassing or phone banking. I couldn't imagine how I would really do it, but I said I would.

So on the last weekend before the election, for the first time in my life, I learned to knock on doors.  My mother did three shifts in three days, I think, and so did I.  The goal was to increase voter turnout in specific precincts that had historically low percentages.  We didn't talk about issues and we didn't talk about the candidates, we just told people to vote.  When we were driving to the church where we would be briefly "trained," we were talking about the non-partisan part and Michael Lipsky said, "I want to get out of this car right now" because it just felt so risky to be getting a cross-section of infrequent voters to go and vote when the election was looking so close. But it was so interesting to be in neighborhoods we had never seen, very tightly packed blocks of developer-built apartments and townhouses.  We had specific doors to knock on, registered voters only, and we took notes on our results.

On Election Day, which was rainy and cold and quite grim, I thought we would probably be making phone calls. But when I got to the church, the organizer asked if I would rather knock on doors or make calls.  I asked what would be most effective and she said she thought knocking on doors was the best use of our time.  I hadn't anticipated this, but of course I had rubber boots and a rain coat on, as I always dress for success.  So we went out to a lower voter turnout area and knocked on every door, indiscriminately, (they call this "knock and drag" for some reason) and asked if people had voted.  We kept count of people who said they had voted and we found a handful of people who said they would go now. I am not sure that we did anything very useful, except to demonstrate to a lot of surprised people that there were volunteers who were willing to walk around in the rain and nudge people into voting. And that may very well have been useful, in a long term sort of way.


The election results were better than we could have hoped for, and I still don't know if we did any good, but at least we made a serious effort.  Last year's election taught me that there are incredibly dire consequences if you let the worst candidate win.  Obviously we weren't campaigning for anyone, but it was a very interesting exercise to try to get more people to vote. I absolutely believe in that, and since we were in neighborhoods with lots of immigrants, we were probably talking to people with a similar agenda to ours.

VOICE volunteers on Election Day. After this, we went inside to pester people by phone.

We have a neighbor in Blueberry Hill who is devoted to canvassing -- he really takes the political process to heart -- and he knocks on doors every weekend for months before the elections.  Now I have a better sense of what he does, and I am even more impressed by his dedication.  It is meaningful work. And you learn so much that you didn't even know you didn't know.  I already knew this, but I really need to learn to speak Spanish.

As VOICE always says, power comes from "organized people" and "organized money."  We were organized people this time, and it felt good.

Alisa (organizer), two volunteers from a local mosque, and our rabbi Michael Holzman going door to door.

Notes from the Last Dark Morning

It is dark as midnight and it is almost 7:00 in the morning.  We have already loaded the three market trucks and everyone is right now putting up tarps in various suburban parking lots and unloading crates of greens while I sit here in my summer-cluttered house and wait for daylight.  Tomorrow is the end of Daylight Savings and the mornings will start earlier again.  Personally I don't really mind the early dark in the evening  because it lengthens the time we can spend not working.

Anyway.  On the way back from the stand this morning I saw a box turtle crossing the road in the dark and I thought of my father.  Many things still make me think of him, of course, as I am still driving the same roads we drove 30-some years ago.  The view has changed completely but the destinations are the same, with one farm at each end of the daily trip.

Whenever he saw a box turtle, it delighted him.  In those days our world was full of salamanders and snakes and turtles, before all the houses were built on our borders.  We lived down the hill in what seemed like an endless woods.  There was a busy stream, Dad dammed up a pond and there was a road on the dam that took us across the stream to the Tractor Shed and to the path through the woods that went uphill through the Moutouxs to Grandma's house.

Right next to the Tractor Shed (where our bedrooms were on the second floor) there was a Bath House.  The Bath House had a bathtub with plumbing that was somehow attached to the pond that was about fifty feet away. The bath water was brown. My dad was just tickled that we had a bathtub. This Bath House was a salamander haven. I don't remember electricity out there, but I do remember the salamanders skittering away when we arrived, so perhaps there was a light bulb.

In those days we had no inkling of what would come to our borders.  As kids, we had no feeling of borders. Our tiny piece of property seemed to go on forever as there were no neighbors.  There were trails for horseback riding, there was a marsh and creeks, it was wilderness. By the time our own children were born, most of that wilderness was hemmed in by houses but the boys still mourn the loss of all that wild space. They missed the salamander and box turtle era and they never knew that.

In the pond my father put a rowboat. As a teenager, he had built rowboats and canoes, so maybe this boat was one of his creations, I don't even know.  But I remember spending hours and hours floating around that tiny pond in the rowboat, writing poetry with Libby and Nell who lived up the hill in the house that my mother now inhabits. There was a huge black snake that liked to wrap itself in the roots of a tree that hung over the edge of the pond.  We did not go near it.

Back then my parents rented that house and we lived in the Tractor Shed during the summer months.  With 50 years of hindsight, I see now that they were doing everything possible to find enough money to fund this crazy enterprise.  They rented every space they could, as another income source, and we lived in buildings with dirt floors. It was totally normal to us since we had no reason to question our parents' choices.

This era of living down the hill in the woods lasted until my parents sold our DC house and we moved to Virginia permanently when I was 11.  We moved into the real house and left the Tractor Shed and Picnic Shed and salamanders behind. Salamanders and weasels and turtles and skunks.  They are gone now.

This is the first turtle I have seen this year.  I didn't touch it (my dad used to collect them up and put them in a cage for a while, as entertainment, like an aquarium).  It just reminded me of the days when there was more diversity around here. Now there are deer and groundhogs and rabbits and foxes.  Very few toads. No salamanders at all.  It's not great.

Blueberry Hill Day

You have heard, in detail, about each of my days off this summer.  They have all been dedicated to family gatherings or Jewish holidays, except for the one day that Jon and I just drove around the Shenandoah Valley eating at various restaurants on a rainy day.  Yesterday was Blueberry Hill Day, the third annual event of its kind.  Traditions are still being created in this world.

We started off with our golf cart parade on a dark and gloomy and sticky humid morning -- rain predicted but it never really happened.  We were in the murky air that usually stays around the Gulf of Mexico.  In the week before, many different neighbors had managed to tie-dye enough T-shirts for everyone, so we were a brightly attired group at 9:30 AM.  The parade was its usual ridiculous event, with noisemakers and streamers and small children riding on the "floats" and the tiny audience taking its job seriously by standing on the side of the greenway and cheering and waving, then running ahead so it could meet us again as we toodled up the sidewalk. Baby Shaia, in the arms of many different supporters, greeted us with her wide-eyed stare. We all try to get her smiling attention but she is mostly a sober observer for now.

Then we took a group picture, while our shirts were still clean.  Then it was time for field games. Participants ranged in age from two to 82, and the games were appropriate for all. The two best ones were untangling the human knot (lots of stepping over arms and twisting through passageways) and passing objects down a line without using hands. 

Then we all headed inside for a big brunch, prepared by some of our hard-working neighbors.  The quiche was late  because the head cook had been a serious parade audience member and couldn't leave his job to get to the kitchen, but there was plenty of food before the quiches came out of the oven.  The Common House was filled with all of us on a Sunday morning, a very rare occasion.

(I took a break then to go watch over the CSA so Carrie could get some lunch and stop working for a brief time.)

The afternoon was a quick series of "classes" where people could learn skills or practice skills.  There was a yoga class downstairs while others sat around stitching a big quilt that Anna has created for us all -- it's a map of Blueberry Hill with small details that show our history together. Then I led a pumpkin pie making workshop while Anna taught a waltz class. 

Then it was time for our first full rehearsal for our first concert of the never-before Blueberry Hill Festival singers.  Kenyon was our leader and he had provided us with links and music and all sorts of homework that only a few good people did. (You can guess that I wasn't one of those good people.) There was a small but mighty soprano group, a large and less mighty alto section, some tenors with skills and a bass section that had potential. Is that how all choirs are?  In 90 minutes of hard work, we learned three songs. Two were hard and one was known to most of us.  With another 90 minutes, we probably could have been ready for a performance.  Kenyon was great -- there is nothing he loves more than making music with people, even after he has just run a ten mile race in that hot soupy weather.

The performance went pretty well, and it made me feel like this group (of 17 singers with a range of experience but all nice voices) should persist, and learn those songs better.  The African one would really be worth knowing.  It was too hard to learn in such a short amount of time, but the effect was still good.  The words were impossible and the rhythms were hard but the group managed to make a joyful noise (Ndandi Hleli, look up the Cornell Glee Club version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya1Swv-O_cE).

Dinner was a giant potluck. We were supposed to make something that had a story that we could tell.  The dining room was packed as full as it ever is, the food was wonderful as potlucks often are.

By the end of the day, we were tired and happy.  It only took a few minutes to clean up the Common House and we all walked home.  Eleven hours of community bonding was plenty.

Jewish Time

While we are seasonally observant Jews, only going to services when it gets dark enough to stop working in time to change our clothes and go, we always observe the High Holidays.  Before I was Jewish myself, and before there were kids, Jon always found a way to go to synagogue on Yom Kippur.  When I began to learn about Judaism, I started to join him in his fast, not even knowing why.

Over time our traditions have solidified.  For a long while, Jon was sad that we didn't have any Jewish people to invite to dinner for the holidays. Our Seder table was filled by my family, always willing to join in but not having the back story. 

We have been part of a Jewish community now for almost 30 years and somehow our family keeps accumulating more Jews along the way.  My mother married a Jewish man from New York and Stephen now has a Jewish partner/spouse/love of his life from Lexington, Mass.  Benjamin lives in Israel and has an Isaeli Jewish girlfriend. The momentum is definitely building, even though no one would characterize any of this family as religious.  

The word "religious" has been co-opted, or maybe our family never would fit into that category.  We live  Jewish values, we are surrounded by Jewish community, we observe holidays, and we do a fair amount of work to sustain a sensible synagogue.  But, except for Benjamin maybe, we do not identify as "religious."

In the last five years or so, we have been closing the farm for Rosh Hashanah.  This takes some doing. Luckily Rosh Hashanah always falls on a weekday.  But weekdays  are CSA days, they are harvest days, and four of them are selling days.  Stopping that train takes planning.  

Why do we bother?  Why not just let the non-Jews keep the farm going, which they are entirely capable of doing, and let the rest of us stop? Because we can.  We own a business and we have the choice.  We don't follow a very high percentage of the commandments, so that's not our motivation.  It is about letting people know that there are others amongst them.  This culture is still so blind to the non-Christian calendar, unwilling to acknowledge or accommodate any holidays that are not baked in by Christians, and this is our tiny statement.  It only hurts us, as a business. It doesn't make anything easier.  But at least the people in our Thursday orbit will have to accommodate our Jewish identity.

Unfortunately Yom Kippur often falls on a Saturday and this is a leap we are not yet capable of making -- as most of our income for the week is generated on Saturday.  Again, we live in a culture that has made Saturday a workday and Sunday is nominally the rest day.  So the Jews of the farm don't work on Yom Kippur, but everyone else does.  

Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah.  There were five workers who still wanted to work, at least a half day. So I said it couldn't be a regular workday, it had to feel different.  They had to do work that allowed for contemplation and conversation.  They didn't have to Jewish about it, they just had to observe the day in their own way.  While nine of us were singing and praying and listening to thoughtful commentary, some were weeding carrots and picking flowers.  I hope they had a good day.

Singing in the choir gives me a job to do while we are at services, and I like the job.  This year our choir has survived some big transitions (new choir director, new accompanist, even a new prayer book) and so it was a bigger job than usual.  As I mentioned before, our director is unfamiliar with Jewish anything, so he is kind of a stranger in a strange land. He is a fine musician and he knows how to get good singing out of us, but he has no idea what is going on when the congregation joins in for the chanting. When the Torahs were out, getting carried around, he was completely unprepared for that in terms of our job of singing continuously.  We knew what to do, and the accompanist was ready, and we just dragged him along. In fact, he had to get out of the way when the parade went by.  There were several occasions where the accompanist was more ready than the director and the choir was able to fill in while he scrambled to figure out where we were.  But it all went beautifully, really, and the service was better than most in recent memory. It felt good to be there, singing familiar music, joyfully.  I got to sit next to my favorite fellow alto (who has a reliable ear and a beautiful voice) and that made the whole thing practically stress-free.

After services our motley Jewish family went back to the Common House and had a leisurely lunch with some of my/our closest friends from temple. It was perfect.  We didn't think about work for hours. We talked about the sermon, the service, the music.  We lounged.  We took our Jewish time.

There is so much to be thankful for, in these reflections.  I am very glad for Jewish time. Now I have to get up and go outside and pick flowers in regular time, and that is another reason for gratitude.

Mid-September Report

At this time of year, I can't think of anything to say that would be interesting to people who are not here in the vegetable vortex. But as I lay in bed this morning thinking, I decided to just write down everything about yesterday, a Sunday in the middle of September.  There was nothing remarkable and yet it was a day full of unusual twists and turns in our small world.

On Sunday, we get to start a little bit later because Takoma Park opens at 10 (Saturday markets open at 8).  So Carrie and Benjamin and I met at the stand at 7:00 to load up.  But half an hour earlier I had received a terse text message from Zach -- one of his two workers announced that she would not be able to go to market with him and he was looking for help.  As it happens, this weekend we were unusually low on people: several regulars were on vacation, one was sick, and my mother and Michael were hosting family.  The stand was already staffed by three people who had agreed to work a shift on their day off. I didn't have many ideas at that hour of a Sunday morning. When I had written the work blog the night before, Sunday seemed so straightforward.  There would be a market crew, a stand crew and Carrie and I would set up the CSA together.

But you can't just let Zach go to his one market of the week without enough people to do the work, so I tried to think of the answer while we loaded Benjamin.  I thought Carrie could go and I could do the CSA by myself.  She didn't say no but she clearly didn't like that answer as Sundays are the one day that she shares Zoey care with Kate, and she didn't feel like leaving the farm for that long. Jon couldn't go because he had a commitment to help someone at the temple with a little project. So, it came down to me. Hmm. We got Benjamin out of there and then we went to start on the CSA room together. I texted Zach and said I could come and he should keep me posted on his search for a worker, knowing that he would not want me to come unless he was truly desperate. He was really looking for a young person with time on her hands.  Carrie and I began to fill shelves with winter squash and watermelons (very late in the season but some new farmers suddenly discovered they had watermelons with nowhere to go, so they got in touch with me and said they would deliver them, and they did, in a car, loose) and kale and beets and potatoes.  I sent Zach another text and said he had to tell me soon, if I was going to be useful. He said come now. I left Carrie to do everything by herself. She had plenty of time before we opened, but it's a big job for one person.

I almost never go to market unless it is truly necessary.  I certainly never take money. But I was heading off to a market that I had never worked at before, specifically to work as a cashier selling vegetables that were grown on our farm but not by us.  Okay, an adventure.  I filled a thermos with my morning hot drink, made a sandwich and drove to Dupont Circle.  Parking was hard but I did it. The market had been open for a half an hour by the time I got there and the place was jammed.  It is a busy and big market, right in the middle of the streets of Dupont Circle.  I have only been there at 6 in the morning to pick up vegetables from Heinz, but this was a whole different scene.  I found Zach and Sam holding down the fort very competently, but they had a long line of customers waiting to pay.  I made myself useful.  We got through it and I learned things I didn't know and met people who have a long relationship with Zach and his vegetables. It was completely familiar and friendly and I was so glad I had missed the unloading and setting up, I was just there for the easy part. When I could see that all the backstock was off the truck, I said I really had to get back to my own farm because we were getting ready for our annual CSA open house.

This open house used to be a much bigger event, with maybe 50 - 100 people and three or four hayrides and some walking tours.  Now it has devolved to a very small event -- we barely advertise it and we don't do a potluck dinner anymore. We just have a two hour hayride/tour/snack gathering and a few families come.  So I came home and talked to Jon about what he could make for the potluck snack (chips and salsa) and I got the hayride set up. Carrie had cleaned up the area for gathering and eating.  At 3:00 about five families with small children arrived, they piled on the wagon and Jon drove them around the farm with Michael Lipsky as the traveling tour guide.  My mother and I stayed back and waited for stragglers. Each of us took a golf cart load of late arriving parents and children to meet the hayride as it slowly wandered around the farm. The kids had a great time and it was fun to meet a small portion of our CSA customers.  People are just too busy nowadays to set aside time for something so discretionary -- except for those who have little kids and need diversion. Pigs and tractors and chickens are just right for that.

We said goodbye, then Mom and Michael L. and I  finally unloaded the Takoma Park truck that couldn't get in behind the stand during the festivities.  Then we helped the new worker close the stand and then it was time for me to go to choir.

We had such an odd choir rehearsal, for the last one before Rosh Hashanah.  Our new choir director had plans for making sure we were ready, and our cantor had other plans.  So we spent the evening doing a rapid and not-singing run through of the services, which was truly not the best use of our time, but the choir director was powerless to stop that train, as he can barely even pronounce any of the Hebrew and has never seen a service yet.  The whole thing was just weird and unfortunate. We ended up feeling sorry for him when we really should have been singing.

And that was Sunday.  Completely different from Saturday when I got to spend the whole day in Loudoun going round and round on one tractor or another and different from today, our day of no selling and only a little bit of picking.

This is why I can't think of anything to write lately.  No time to think, and almost no time to write. But life is busy and full and I am surrounded by people I enjoy and appreciate and we are all getting through this season without suffering.  Benjamin just got home on Saturday after a week long loop through New England on his motorcycle, visiting people and having a good time. Now he will be here for a couple of months, earning some money and writing a paper that needs to be written.

Compared to almost all the news in the outside world, life is idyllic here in this vegetable bubble.

Good News -- We Did Not Crash and Burn

It is the last day of August and I have about seven minutes before I have to go out to start the day (it's dark at 6:15 now).  Often, August is the month that has drama and tears and stress and people quitting and people feeling burnt out and Ellen and I always said that you should never make any big decisions. While we have had all the same amount of work and tomatoes to cope with, we have not had any of that other trauma and drama.  Things are going pretty well, no one is feeling too overworked and underappreciated and the trains are still running on time. I just wanted to note this because our crew is down to its fall nubbins and they picked 150 ponies of tomatoes in the last two days (100 of those in the all-day rain because they wanted to) and people are still singing in the bean patch.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of non-farm stuff to cope with. Carrie has had a particularly trying month, with a suicide in her family and a wife who is always having to travel for work, leaving Carrie in charge of the indomitable Zoey.  Stephen and Julia are learning to manage life with a six week old who has nearly doubled in size and worldliness since she appeared. We have had a steady stream of illnesses moving through the crew (unrelated to work, but affecting their availability).

But the work keeps happening and the tomatoes keep coming and the fields look pretty beautiful and we are in the process of merging two farms and farm systems, taking our farmer friend Zach into our fold, which is a huge undertaking and flies in the face of the past wisdom of not making any big decisions on August.

And that is the seven minute update. We are at the peak of my personal Long Day season (12 hours outside, then desk), but this means the hours will get shorter from now on.

It's August, Time for Another Wedding

For a few hours, I had a super power.  I had the authority once again to marry two people in the state of Virginia. I used my power for good -- it's the third time I have performed a real wedding.  Two other times I have presided over a ceremony that followed the courthouse wedding. This side career was not my idea, but it keeps on evolving.

This one was different because it is the first time I have brought my Jewish self to the task.  I think that is partly why they asked me to do it -- the groom was raised in Cleveland in a Jewish family, had a Bar Mitzvah and kind of slid away from regular observance as an adult.  The bride was raised Catholic but was more interested in keeping the Jewish traditions.

I didn't give myself much time to think about it -- like a real officiant, I started writing last night and started thinking through the issues this morning -- but I am quite conscious of my clergy friends and their feelings about people without a formal education/title taking on roles that are traditionally reserved for those with training.

But the state of Virginia has a special and very precise program for "one time civil celebrants."  You have to apply to the judge and I don't know what kind of checking he does, but eventually you get a letter saying you are allowed to marry these people on this specific date, and only those people on only that date. Then you go to the county courthouse for an appointment with the clerk at 8:30 on a Thursday morning (not as simple as it sounds -- I had to be in the flowers at 6 AM, just as it was light enough to see, so I could pick for a soggy hour and a half before stripping off my soaked clothes and going to town..and the hardest part was walking the long walk from the parking garage uphill to the massive courthouse. It was a hot and steamy day and I don't walk on pavement very often.).

The clerk is exacting and direct.  She explains all about the bureaucratic requirements, and the five celebrants practice filling out a marriage license. No mistakes, black ink only, super tidy. There are no rules about what anyone says at the wedding, the only rule is that you fill out the form and get it back within five business days or your forfeit the $500 bond.  The $500 bond ensures that the records will be proper -- there is a couple who thought they were married for 20 years before they went to get a divorce, only to discover that their celebrant had never filed the proper papers.  Five years later, they are still in court.  That's the story that supports this practice.

I had only met with the bride and groom once about two months ago to discuss everything, and last night we had a second meeting during their pre-wedding pizza party.  I learned enough to write something coherent, but I still didn't know how Jewish they wanted to be.  I didn't know how Jewish I wanted to be, for that matter.

In the end, I looked through some of my books, read about weddings to see what makes it a real Jewish wedding, found some blessings that met their needs (secular and modern, without direct references to the King of the Universe) and wrote my part.

It was delightful to have no other job. I didn't have to cook or clean up or direct people or carry a table or anything. I just stood under the chuppah and watched those beautiful young people and their little boys come down the aisle.  The boys were like puppies, falling all over themselves -- dressed in white jackets, dress shirt and ties, shorts and bare feet.

I introduced myself as a Jewish adult, not a rabbi, and the wedding was as Jewish as I felt allowed to make it.  I did not invoke the Laws of Moses and Israel. I did not talk about God. I spoke about the beauty of the diversity of humanity, etc. I felt that I stayed within the bounds of what I am competent to do, and that it would have been very hard for them to find a rabbi for this, and that maybe there is a chance that they will have a more Jewish home because of this day.  The mother of the groom was surprised and happy -- she had no idea that her son would want a Jewish wedding and he never gave her a hint about it.  But of course there had been no plan, it all came about in the last day. The mother read the Priestly Benediction and the Zochreinu -- she had come prepared to do her best to keep her traditions alive.

The whole event was lovely and low-key, with a crowd-sourced meal (high quality food cooked by friends), the air was amazingly comfortable for mid-August, and everyone looked beautiful.  Just how a wedding should be. And it was four minutes from home, which is as good as it gets.

Alice Horn

Last year, on Memorial Day, we went to a family gathering in New Jersey -- the last Bar Mitzvah of this generation. These are relatives on Jon's mother's side of the family and they have a long tradition of getting together for picnics and parties, in addition to the life cycle celebrations that are much grander.   Jon's mother came from Boston with Dena, Jon's uncle Peter came from Columbus, it was a real reunion. Jon's aunt Alice was there too (the grandmother of the Bar Mitzvah boy), although she was much less there than anyone would have wished.

I can't remember the details, but Alice was diagnosed a few years ago with a degenerative neurological condition -- something in her frontal lobe.  Dire and incurable.  She was young and healthy enough to stay at home with her husband and various caregivers, so she quietly went into a decline. She had been an artist and a teacher, and had become an art teacher for children with special needs. Their cozy house was filled with her bright and colorful paintings.  By last May, she had lost her capacity to speak but she was still present. She knew her family and she made it clear she wanted to be near them, especially her two sons and her two grandsons. She enjoyed eating, which made me happy.

Alice had been an observant Jew for her whole life, and even with her compromised brain the rituals seemed familiar and comfortable to her.  She had a role in the Torah service that day, and her eyes were bright. While it would have been wonderful to have her there as the gracious and attentive hostess and grandmother she once was, it felt so lucky to have her there.

A year later, Alice's brain was worse, and she couldn't even eat anymore.  The family considered their options and David, her husband of 57 years, decided to bring her back home after a hospital stay, and to continue to give her nutrients.  She stayed alive longer than anyone expected, but she was no longer in charge of her destiny, as she had been for her whole married life. We all waited to hear that she was nearing her last days, expecting the news any time.

Weeks passed, then months.  Finally the doctors told her husband that she might only live for a few more days, or perhaps even just one more day.  Alice's son in Israel started the long trip home, praying that she would wait until he got back before she died. She died early on Wednesday, they planned the funeral for Thursday. Her son arrived at dawn on Thursday, heartbroken that he had missed the chance to say goodbye.

As we have seen so many times before, a skilled group organized everything, invisibly. The local son and his wife undoubtedly had everything to do with the planning and execution of all that had to happen within a very short amount of time. The rabbi who led the service is so familiar to us, he is the rabbi who presided over the Bar Mitzvahs.  The cantor had known Alice and David for 25 years, and he chanted the 22 verses about the "woman of valor" with incredible, gorgeous voice control (so quietly and clearly, so hard to do).

Jewish funerals are rather free-form, without a set structure.  So they are often heart-wrenchingly full of stories told by family and friends.  The first speaker was a niece who had been very close to her aunt, and she was eloquent and tearful.  Second was Alice's twin sister who spoke without notes, briefly and to the point -- her husband followed up with some comments of his own, making very warm mention of his long relationship with David.  The last to speak was the youngest son, just off the plane.  He said that as he tried to think of what he would say, he had two main thoughts:  first that he prayed fervently that someone would get up at the funeral and speak better than he could (and he thanked his cousin profusely for being that person) and the second was that this would be the first time he had ever arrived home without his mother there. The light was out.now and that was impossible to comprehend. She had been a devoted mother, always weeping when he left home to go back to his international adventures.  Without notes, he fully expressed his sense of loss and his gratitude to all those who had taken care of everything so well.

The little sanctuary was fuller than I would have expected, given Alice's long retreat from daily life. I wished someone had spoken about her life as a teacher and an artist.  We got a full picture of her as a wife and mother and sister and aunt and grandmother -- the powerful, loving matriarch  who presided over her family and home.  No one mentioned how tiny she was, something I always noticed as I towered over her during a welcome or farewell hug.

It surprised me how very sad everyone was.  I would have thought they would have gone through so much grief already, having lost the real Alice. But no, this was new grief, knowing they wouldn't see her anymore.  Having her in the room for all those months was comforting, I guess, even though it was also tragic.

It is always traumatic to throw dirt onto the top of the coffin.  That sound just breaks hearts.  But after a while, the box gets covered and the sound is softer and it is less devastating.  At Leon's and my own father's burial, we filled the entire grave, finishing the job. But that is not standard behavior. So we covered the top of Alice's plain pine box with a layer of clumpy clay and we left her there.  This was really hard for her small family.  They wept.  It is a family who can cry, and that reassures me.

There was a huge amount of food at the house, and many comfortable places to sit and talk and look at photos.  The afternoon slid by. We spent a good amount of time talking about Broadway shows with a lively woman whose name I did not catch.  She goes to a lot of shows.

Jon and I left before the evening service, heading back home.  The trip was easy and we rolled in at 10 PM.  We had never doubted that we would go, when the time came, and it was nice that it was so easy to extricate ourselves at a moment's notice during the most busy time of year.  Life went on at the farm, smoothly, while we took the day to be with family.  It was a good day, and Alice will be remembered by everyone who loved her.  As the rabbi reminded them, death ends a life but it doesn't end a relationship.  How well we know that.

May the Circle Be Unbroken

While some of us are sweating through our shirts before the sun is already up in the sky, others are doing hard work of another kind.  Being born and dying -- that kind of hard.  The uncle that we visited in Boston recently, he died.  He was such a gracious, kind, gentle, intelligent, funny, talented man with a strong moral compass and a wonderful deep voice.  He was adored by grandchildren, children, nieces and nephews and probably dozens of people I never heard of. He had a soft Louisiana accent and a slow way of speaking, allowing for many dry jokes. He left this life quietly and without fussing about the way he had to go. We don't get to choose how we die but if we are lucky we get to choose how we feel about dying. I never had a conversation with him about it but he died the same way he lived, patiently and without loud complaints.  He was at home with hospice care, always with my aunt Sarah.  

As we all know, dying is hard work.  It seems so much better to know that you are dying and to be allowed to think that through than it would be to die quickly and without warning. Of course lots of people don't get to think it through because their minds don't stay strong, but Jim was lucky to have his good mind the whole time, even if sleeping became the main activity in the end.  When my father died, he never took the opportunity to understand that he was going to not going to  be able to get through his illness. Because he missed that chance, we all did, and that has colored my feelings about death for decades. But  watching people like Jim and Grandma Hiu and Uncle Vern confront their departures, that has helped me to see how I want to be, if I can, when I die. I want to die old and I want to die knowing that this is happening.  If I can't be old, I still want to be aware. I definitely don't want to die tragically and suddenly.  That seems like such a waste of a chance to participate.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the cycle, Julia and Stephen spent a few days waiting for their baby to appear after Julia's water broke.  They hung around, doing little things while they waited, and after a few days the baby decided to make an appearance.  They had the baby at home, to the consternation of some of their more conservative and caring relatives, and everything went amazingly well.  So now there is a two week old in our midst. Her name is Shaia Rose, which I say rhymes with papaya nose, and she is a wee thing with no schedule that matches the rest of the world yet. Julia is less surprised than Stephen, I think, at all the demands that this little six pound person can make.  Everyone is thriving despite the lack of sleep.

And now I have to get out there and sweat through another set of clothes. My job is much less momentous than birthing and dying, but feeding people is what happens in between the beginning and the end.

Another Triumph of Spontaneity and Planning

Two weeks ago there was the wedding.  And then nearly two weeks after that celebration, a baby was born to the brother and sister-in law of the groom -- much to the joy and relief of her mother and father and all the waiting cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Like all happily anticipated babies, she will be the center of family attention for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, for many months another celebration has been in the works.  In coordination with the wedding day (which brought Benjamin home from Haifa), the Groisser clan chose a date when all of the family could convene in honor of Gram/Mom/Lilah.  She has already been 90 years old for three months, which is even more cause for celebration. She is going strong.

Everyone arranged to be in Boston for the weekend.  Sarita and James came from California, Benjamin had come from Israel for the double header, Dena and Jacob flew from Denver, Steve came home from Albuquerque, we drove from Virginia and the rest of them were already in the area. It has become a regular tradition of ours to gather perhaps once a year or maybe a little less often, depending on the excuse we have for convening. It is a small family: all 14 of us fit easily into our group photo. We have quite a series of these pictures by now, and we each have our own opinions about which were the most awkward years for the people in the photographs.

Because this is a family that knows its limits, there was no plan for unscheduled stretches of togetherness. Sue took the job of organizing the food and the venue (the biggest and only really necessary job), welcoming us once again to her house for dinner and brunch. The house fits us perfectly and has become a natural home for our reunions, now that she has renovated it and created so much open space for easy socializing -- in the place where they all grew up. Nothing could really be more perfect.

As always, each of us has our own story of what it took to extricate ourselves from our normal lives.  In the case of the farmers who drove from Virginia, we had decided to try to leave home before rush hour on Friday, knowing how impossible it is to escape the area.  We chose the long route, heading west and then north through Pennsylvania.  By the time we got to Leesburg we were in the midst of a crashing thunderstorm.  Within minutes we got news from Carrie that all the electricity was out at the farm and a big tree had fallen into the pigpen and crashed down some power lines.  Jon was immediately very sorry to be away from home and was sorely tempted to turn around to help deal with these issues.  They are his department.  Benjamin and I did not agree to turn back, so Jon had to satisfy himself with giving lots of detailed instructions to Carrie about generators and setting priorities for which coolers and freezers needed power.  All the coolers were filled with the weekend's market loads.  This has happened before, but we were home last time.  Carrie followed all the directions and kept the coolers cool.

By mid-morning on Saturday, most issues were resolved.  Jon will be able to cut up the fallen tree himself when we get home. 

Up until this trip, the house in Brookline has been our middle of the night destination -- for my entire life. But that house has been sold to a young family and we went to sleep in Alissa's nice apartment in Somerville for the first time ever. So many eras ending and beginning.

Because we had not thought it through, none of us realized that we would have a whole weekend of hanging around together with our nuclear family of five.  Tonight at dinner we all tried to remember how long it has been since we took a trip, just the five of us, and we had to go back 10 years to the winter of 2007. It did feel quite unusual to be driving around in a car together for two days.  Alissa did most of the driving and there was a navigation team in the backseat, offering a range of opinions. Highly entertaining.  

We went to see Sarah and Jim, knowing that Jim might not wake up for visitors.  He is in a rapid decline, staying comfortable with hospice care, sleeping in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room.  To our surprise and joy, he eventually woke up and greeted us.  

I had not expected to be recognized, but he knew who we were, why we were there, and seemed glad to see us. He is especially close to Alissa, and they got to have a private conversation while the rest of us went to see the new apartment (they are moving in the next two days, we are amazed at the adherence to the plan). 

 We went out for lunch on Saturday at a restaurant named Moldova, in honor of the winter trip that Becca and Benjamin took a few years ago.  We all liked the food and the hands-off wait staff.  Then we went to a used book store in Waltham and splurged on a pile of books for gifts and back stock. Then we went to Gram's apartment so Alissa could get the photo board put together (another tradition that has evolved in recent years). At every opportunity, I took a nap, several times each day. That's what defines a vacation: lots of naps.

And finally it was time for the event which brought us all here.  It was a low-key, non-stressful party.  Just us and our gracious Gram/Mom.  We ate delicious grilled vegetables and salmon and some people watched the Red Sox game and then we sat down to say a few things about our gratitude for this matriarch and what she has taught us or given us.  No one sang or performed anything, as we did at Jon's party.  We just reminisced and were thankful.  And of course Leon was entirely present in our hearts and minds.  He is always with us when we are together, sometimes even continuing to hog the limelight. It was a sweet evening.

For the Groisser family from Virginia, it was an especially sweet weekend.  We just don't get to spend much time together since everyone grew up and went away.  We have big family gatherings but no small ones.  So this was the biggest treat of all, and it was totally unexpected. Different from 10 or 20 years ago, these three are so happy to be together, even if crammed into a hot car in July. 

We went back for one final visit with Jim, and he was groggy, much more as we had imagined.  This time it felt like a real farewell.  He could acknowledge us but he could hardly keep his eyes open.  We gave him kisses and hugs and said goodbye for the last time.  

What a full two days.  We crammed so much family experience into about 36 hours.  Whew.

A Triumph of Planning and Last Minute-ness

Jesse and Shalini agreed to have a wedding, even though they were not themselves particularly interested in planning such an event.  Their family and friends insisted, and eventually they gave in and began to make it happen.  They talked to people, they found out when most would be able to gather (from all over the world, including Israel and India) and they finally came to their  family to get some of the details in order. Jesse and Shalini are related to a wide circle of do-ers: people who can do it all.  Jesse's mother is organized, effective, calm, connected to people who can help, and it is easy for her to make anything happen (especially now that she is married to Gordon, a hero among do-ers).  Jesse has family with lots of resources:  a place to get married, cooking skills, a passion for baking, deep and wide skill bases.  On his father's side, there is an army of hard-working and plan-ful people.  He has brothers with incredible creativity and talent. Shalini and Jesse have a core group friends who are smart and funny and pure of heart and they were willing to do whatever was asked.

It would have been hard not to have this wedding, with all this power humming and waiting.

They chose July 1, despite the Virginia heat.  They accepted our invitation to have the wedding at the blueberry patch, which would be bursting with berries.  They graciously accepted Jon's offer to cook the wedding dinner, and they allowed Anna and Gordon to plan and cook the rehearsal dinner and the Sunday brunch.  Alissa offered to do all the baking, knowing that Rebecca would help with the cake decorating.  Stephen took the role of creating the wedding space.  Jesse took the job of renting the tent and tables and dishes and other necessities.

It was amusing to watch the whole event unfold.  Jesse took responsibility for everything that needed to be done before the real preparations began.  And Shalini did go buy herself a dress (but quickly figured out not to tell anyone at the stores that she was buying a wedding dress, that caused too much drama and increased prices) a couple of months before the wedding.  It was Shalini who decided what the dinner menu would be -- because she and Jesse dropped by late one night and had leftovers from our fridge and she immediately couldn't stop thinking about Thai food after that.   Other than that, Shalini stayed out of it.

Little did we know that they had chosen the exact same date as another young person who had grown up in Blueberry Hill, and that bride and groom had already made many more plans than our family had. (No surprise.) The Common House was already claimed for the rehearsal dinner.  We needed another idea.  Luckily, many of us are attached to my mother's front yard, as frumpy as it is. That's where her grandchildren, that pile of cousins, spent years of their youth -- playing in the sandbox, making structures out of giant foam blocks, sliding down the slide, eating Freezie Pops.  Despite some worries about heat and other outdoor discomforts, we went with that idea.

Anna and her crew transformed that neglected but shady yard into a lovely dinner spot.  They picked flowers from the farm, put tablecloths on the Reston Runners tables and presented a meal of Jesse's comfort foods: salmon and rice, orzo with feta and spinach, Gordon's bread.  Stephen and Benjamin got drafted at the last minute (by me) to make the garlic green beans -- picked on that day, the first of the season.  And for the first time in the history of the world, the extended families of Shalini and Jesse were together.  It was perfect.  Breezy, comfortable, delightful.  Shalini's parents came to the US a couple of weeks ago so they were well adjusted to the time zone, and they used to live in New York, and they have been here once before for a brief visit, so they were not in a state of shock. They were calm and present, and so happy. Cousins and boyfriends and spouses and aunts and uncles and grandmothers: 50 people celebrating (most of them from Jesse's side, but Shalini's relatives held their own).

From Thursday through Saturday, our own house was a food factory. Jon did his usual strategic cooking, figuring out what could be cooked first and stashed in the cooler. Alissa did the same. They jockeyed for space at the counter and the stove, cranking out pan after pan of curry and fruit bars and layers of cake and so many sauces.  Alissa was the more organized of the two. Jon spent too much time in the night trying to stay on schedule.

Meanwhile, Stephen picked buckets and buckets of flowers and on Saturday he took a huge crew of cousins and friends to our flower farmer neighbor's fields and picked hundreds more blooms that were no longer marketable.  They spent Saturday afternoon decorating the huge bamboo structure (an icosohedron, or a huppah, or a 12-sided die).  It was a dramatic and wild work of beauty, tucked into the shady clearing that Jon had created years before for Anna's wedding -- but that space was never used because it rained on that day.  This time the shade was essential to our survival on that steamy July afternoon.

The ceremony was familiar but entirely unique, as the officiant was a long time friend of the bride and groom, and he was not tied to any tradition.  He is also a very funny guy, and his whole talk was full of self-deprecating, clear and honest observations about Jesse and Shalini and their 10 years together.  He teaches Classics by day, and he had no trouble being the master of the ceremony -- acknowledging that he had no power vested in him, except that Jesse and Shalini had given him this role.  Since they have already been legally married for a year and a half, he could say whatever he wanted. He was great.

Michael provided a brief musical interlude, singing and playing the guitar. Like a cherub, so calm and tuneful and full of sweet emotion.

Up at the tent near the blueberries, final preparations for dinner were underway.  We had hired three young women from the farm crew to help us set up and serve, and they are accustomed to following directions from me, so even though the work was entirely new to them, they were ready to do whatever was asked. It took me a while to realize none of them had ever actually been to an event like this, and explicit directions were needed.  Jon had thought of everything, all the platters and heating pans and serving utensils, and we just got it all in the right place.  He had also managed to get all the flavors right, so the sauces were excellent, the salads were not soggy, and if only the fish hadn't taken so long to heat up in the oven, there would have been almost no stress. A lot of work, but it was not stressful.Alissa's David stood at the grill and cooked the beef teriyaki skewers, handing platters to the servers to carry away.

Decorations were low-key and homemade, homegrown.  Party favors were also homemade by friends and family.  Stephen gave a best man speech for the ages, incorporating big brother stories, Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Master Jesse/God and gratitude.

Alissa and Rebecca spent about an hour in the cooler, decorating the cakes.  They had decided that since this wasn't an official wedding, they didn't need to make the traditional tall cake with the structural dowels, they would just make it with the same ingredients and have smaller cakes. Good thinking. And the frosting didn't even melt in the heat.  The sour cherry (from our cherry tree) and mango filling made it a very special cake.

Some day Alissa will teach me how to get pictures on this blog, now that they have changed the system and I can't get them from my phone easily, but of course there are bazillions of pictures and they would make all these words pretty pointless.  The view of the farm was expansive and green and mowed, with crops in the distance (unusually orderly because we knew we would be part of the scenery), the sky was full of color as the sun went down over the low mountain, the humidity was thick but the air was in motion.  The heat did not stop the crowd from dancing with abandon, well into the night, well after Jon and I packed up the van and headed home.

On the way home, I asked him if he would do this again (a day before he said he would never do this again), and he said, yes he would.  There will be more weddings eventually, and with every one, we all learn more about how to do it better. Jesse and Shalini really liked this one, and they especially liked not having to do anything at the last minute except be there on time, dressed and ready to be the bride and groom. They did their job with grace. No rehearsal, no fuss, they arrived and made it all come true.

A Moment for a Shechechyanu

This is a postcard from this moment.  In this house right now we have Alissa and Benjamin and Rebecca and Jon and me.  Alissa is working on a variety of desserts, Benjamin is examining an ancient camera that he found on the porch, Rebecca just went outside and brought in her demonstration plate of six different versions of cake and frosting (testing how they hold up in heat), Jon is about to clean up the pans that were used for frying fish.  We just asked Rebecca to find some metal pitchers for the iced tea and she went right to Amazon and ordered some.  Why metal?  Because Jesse has made choices for his wedding that don't involve any plastic or paper so we don't want to serve anything out of a dish that doesn't match that standard.  Plus it would be nice to have some good pitchers.

This is what weddings do.  They cause everyone to come together, stop what they are usually doing, and focus on creating an event that is an expression and celebration of the people who are getting married.

My own role is minimal.  I am continuing to do farm stuff, and I come inside now and then to help to come up with solutions to unsolved problems, and to taste the frosting to see which one will hold up best and still taste good when it is hot out.  We just discussed and figured out what serving dishes we will use -- by looking around the kitchen and realizing that we have what we need, way up on top of the cupboards.

Alissa has switched over to making dipping sauces. None of us will be hungry by Saturday. We will have had our fill of cake and dip.  The current version of dipping sauce under construction is ranch dressing with herbs.

Benjamin is disturbed to learn that we have one of those Alexa things in our house -- he thinks that our conversation is being recorded and sent back to headquarters.  He has spent his life trying to stay off the grid.

Now Rebecca is reverting to her favorite pastime: sharing trivia questions from some huge database. I don't even try to answer those questions. Inevitably, the conversation moves on to discussions of history and culture as they try to figure out the answer.  Rebecca has been playing trivia for years and years -- it entertains her mightily.

Anyway, I need to return to the outdoors where the vegetables are still happening, but these moments are so delicious. Oops, Alissa just ignored the timer and forgot to get the cakes out of the oven, so distracting is this conversation, and Rebecca is shrieking at her.  All is right with this little world.

The Roller Coaster of Belonging

As everyone who reads this knows, Jon and I belong to multiple communities, and those communities provide the context for our identity.  We live and breathe this farm, we live and breathe Blueberry Hill, and I have a longstanding role at the temple as a leader, in addition to our shared role as engaged congregants.  Plus, we have our family. In all of these circles, we have dear friends. We are entirely committed to each of these communities and we give ourselves heart and soul to them.  Sometimes one more than another, depending on the season.

Every story I write is about something that happens within one of these four communities.  In the last two days, all four of these communities have asked something of us, or given us something.  I woke up this morning (it is now 5:30) still feeling quite frayed.  Bruised, almost, from the roller coaster. It's crazy because nothing terrible happened, nobody died, and almost no one else would even think of this as a bruising couple of days, looking in from the outside.

Luckily, the farm is great. The crew is doing excellent work, both farms look beautiful, the vegetables are plentiful, the management team is succeeding, and we are selling piles of nicely washed beets and lettuce and leeks.  CSA customers are really happy and the trains are running completely on time. We could not wish for anything more than this. So there is nothing to report there.

At the end of April, nearly two months ago, I got a frantic call from the rabbi as I was driving home from Loudoun.  He was panicked because he had just had a meeting with the President and Vice President of the temple and they had told him that the Board had just agreed that there is not enough money in the budget to renew his contract.  He was shocked and upset to be told that the Board had come to this conclusion, without even having a conversation with him about what he might want in his next contract.  Since then, much of my non-farm life has been spent dealing with the aftermath of this unexpected revelation.

He called me because I am the chair of the Pulpit Committee and there was no one else to call, really. The Pulpit Committee is the designated liaison between the clergy and the congregation -- we deliver the messages back and forth if the communications are not easy. We talk to people and find out how the clergy is doing and we report back to the Board and the clergy.  Sometimes there is nothing to do and sometimes that work just takes all the time that there is.

In the last two months we have been learning how that conversation between the rabbi and the leaders came to be, and we have been using established processes to get the conversation back on track. I wrote about this already on May 30, so this is old news.  But that calm between the storms did not hold and more storms came through.

The story isn't interesting enough to tell in detail, but in the last two days, a new level of drama emerged.  It's still about personalities and bad patterns, but time is getting short.  In less than two weeks, the rabbi would need to decide whether he is going to start looking for a new job.  The drama is heightened by the financial troubles at the temple.  And it is made so much worse by the President's desire to have the rabbi go, and the congregation's desire to have him stay.

Yesterday, after finding myself crying on multiple occasions about all this trouble, it became clear to me what needed to happen, and happen now.  It was not at all clear how to get it to happen, but we had to try. Nancy and I spent a lot of time talking to people, writing, thinking.  We found others who agreed with us. And by the end of the day, the President of the congregation resigned, effective immediately.  There is no joy here.  Only relief that we can try to fix these problems with a new set of players.  There are endless meetings on the horizon, and I don't doubt that my name and my integrity will continue to be questioned (hence the tears) and I am sure there is more ugliness to come.  This is so tiring.

On Friday night, while it was Shabbat and the emails could stop for a few hours (Reform Jews just stop emailing on Friday night. On Saturday most of us just get right back into it.), Blueberry Hill had its annual recital.  Betsy (my friend since we were in elementary school) organizes it every year and it is a triumph of sweetness and joy and warmth and entertainment.  This one was amazing.  The youngest performer was two years old, singing so quietly, sitting on the piano bench and barely visible, that none of us could hear the words but we could see that he was earnestly singing a long song.  The oldest performer was about 85, reading a loving poem that she wrote about her granddaughter coming to visit and hogging the bed.  The most polished performance, I thought, was delivered by three musicians (two farmers and a lifelong singer)-- an original rap song based on a great Hamilton song, called the Ten Commandments of Farming. The harmonies and the rhythms were perfect. So clever and delicious.  My mother and I, for the first time ever, performed piano duets.  We had decided the day before to do it, but I had already learned the duets for a recital in May and my mother could easily learn her part in one day.  After two rehearsals in 24 hours, we were ready and we did ourselves proud.  All the performances were enthusiastically cheered, and they were all delightful.  This is Blueberry Hill at its finest.

Last night, Jon and I went to different social events. I went to the party to celebrate our recently retired choir director and Jon went to the weekly family dinner. He is preparing to be the chef for Jesse's upcoming wedding, and he has been practicing his recipes at these dinners.  The choir party was a final gathering for a group that has sung together for decades -- many of the singers are planning to stop singing with us, taking this transition as an opportunity to reclaim their Sunday evenings. Some have been singing for over 40 years together, so this was a bittersweet event.

In a few minutes, I will go down to the stand to help load the market truck with Stephen and Michael Lipsky, then Heinz will roll in with his load of CSA vegetables and then I will get to work on setting up the CSA room for our third week. Sometimes the farm is a source of drama, but not now, thank goodness.  The weather is not challenging us at the moment and the work is getting done without undue effort.

As always, I am so glad we are healthy.  Jon is doing better than ever right now.  Our life is just about as good as it gets.

Upper Management

I cannot remember when I have ever overslept -- or not since high school.  The kind of oversleeping where you wake up to that shocking realization that you are supposed to be somewhere else, and you fling yourself out of bed and into your clothes (which you set out for yourself the night before, in the event that such a thing might happen, even though it never does).  I only set an alarm for Saturday mornings because the rest of the week there is enough leeway that I am sure I won't need technology to get me up on time.

But it happened this Saturday. I had set my alarm, but had not made sure that the volume was up. Somehow Jon woke up, touched my arm, I opened my eyes and saw it was 6:08, Thirty minutes late. I flew out of bed and onto my golf cart and was down at the stand by 6:13. Hadn't been able to get my feet into my underwear so I went without, but I did have pants on.  I had missed the first truck before it left for market, and they had not noticed they didn't have their money box.

The funny thing is, nobody was worried that I was not there.  And the reason is that they don't really need me. The systems are all in place, everyone knows what to do.  The clipboards with the lists are all prepared and the vegetables are stacked and ready to be assembled into their market vehicles. I am merely a back-up, in case of mishaps.  There are mishaps -- people oversleep, there are car issues, we have made mistakes in picking, etc.

It was easy to figure out how to get the money box to Arlington since we had an unusually big crew going to Falls Church.  The two markets are ten minutes apart, so Carrie could go the extra miles and drop it off.  That was no big deal.

As it happened, there was an unexpected lettuce shortage and we needed six more crates. Luckily the Reston truck leaves a half an hour after the first one, so I had time to go to the field, pick six crates of lettuce and get back in time to stick it on Michael's van before he rolled out. As I raced back from the field, I saw a deer inside the fence (a familiar one, a regular Saturday morning trespasser) and I didn't have time to deal with it, but I knew I would come back to find it in a few minutes.

Then I loaded a van with 24 crates so I could pick the Sunday lettuce.  I knew I didn't want to chase a deer around in a minivan so I got back on my golf cart to go in search of the deer. Couldn't find it. Went back to get the van and found that Jon had taken it, thinking I had left it for him to go pick up vegetables from Casey and Stacey.  I had to laugh. The morning was still off-kilter, and we were less than an hour into it.  Loaded another van with more crates and of course this time the deer was hanging around near the gate.  Usually I don't try to round up deer on my own two feet, but this deer is particularly slow-witted, and I herded her out of the gate and got back in my vehicle.

It is high lettuce season and it takes no time at all to pick these gigantic, gorgeous heads.  I parked next to the patch and did not have to move once. Just filled up all the crates from one spot about the size of our kitchen.

And then I could finally go home and put some underwear on.  Carrie would come back from market to wash the lettuce in a bit, and I would head to Loudoun with Jon.

The point of this story is that we have come to a place in our work culture where the systems are strong enough to withstand most unexpected events.  We can handle anything that is expected -- there are charts and schedules for that -- but we can also manage when the most upper manager falls down on the job.  That is really good to know.

Between Storms

Last night, for the first time since July of 2014, I spent the night in Loudoun by myself. At the last minute before we set off from Vienna, Jon was still wrestling with the schedule: his work was all in Vienna today and mine was in Loudoun.  He just didn't really want to come, and I did.  Our own version of the bi-coastal marriage, with work keeping us apart.

Part of the reason I wanted to come, other than being in the right place for work, is we haven't been here overnight in two weeks.  My other job, the volunteer job that occasionally blows up into a demanding all-out attention hog, has been dominating my evenings.  The temple is going through a challenging time, largely due to poor communication habits, no consensus on leadership roles, general incompetence, and personality differences. The cohort of leaders that I am closest to (past presidents, mostly) has been out of the loop for a few years and only recently have we inserted ourselves back into the fray. With mixed results, I must confess.

It is far too early to go into detail here -- the conversations are still ongoing -- but we have got past some of the worst parts. Even though I have not been the president for nearly ten years, I have graduated to an elder stateswoman role and there is always work, under these circumstances.  As always, the basic rules continue to apply:  tell the truth, speak clearly, don't burn bridges, and keep talking.  This is harder than it sounds when we are working with people who won't maintain any of those simple rules. For some reason, drama and posturing is much more appealing to our lay leadership -- even though they too have the best interests of the congregation at heart. I have no doubt about that. They come at it from a different direction, but they truly want the best for everyone, even if it means trading out our current clergy for a cheaper model.

I have spent the last month ranting and raving to Jon, between each phone call and  meeting. He is my main sounding board and he keeps me sane. He sits on the couch and hears my end of the conversations and he says, "wow, I have never heard you be so political."

On the positive side, there is a process for all of this and we are doing our best to honor the process, despite the need for drama and posturing.  And for right this minute, my job is done.  The committee that delivers a report from the congregation (I am the chair) scrambled to do its work, speaking to about 80 people on the phone and in person, collecting the wisdom and experience of the group.  Usually this committee is nearly invisible, but circumstances brought our work into the spotlight and we were bombarded with letters, in addition to the random phone conversations we initiated. We delivered our findings to the rabbi and then to the Board, and we were thanked and sent home. Our findings stated unequivocally that the congregation wanted to keep the rabbi, contrary to the spontaneous plan of some of the leadership to trade him in. He isn't perfect, but we still want to keep him.

So now we wait to see what happens next.  All through this month, I have been comparing the shenanigans of the temple to the national political scene.  There are definitely places that remind me of the U.S. Government.  It just shows that humans, when working as the leaders of an organization, do not always rise to their best.  We come from different backgrounds, we bring our own lifetime of experiences to the shared tasks, and sometimes we just don't get it right. People in leadership might be the worst people to do the job.  Who in the world would want to be President? Only someone with some big ego issues. This is not entirely accurate in synagogue life, but the opportunities for mismanagement are certainly always there, and it is easy to head down the wrong path when you think you know best and aren't so good at consulting the group.

Anyway, I came to Loudoun last night because I could.  I didn't have any meetings or phone calls, I am on the sidelines for now, and sleeping in our airy cabin seemed like exactly the right medicine.  When I woke up at dawn, I looked outside and saw a wild turkey bopping around near the hammock.  When I went to the outhouse, there was a large deer peering at me from Jon's clearing.  I haven't spoken to anyone in over twelve hours.  Bliss.