Indian Summer

      Sunrises are particularly beautiful around here, or perhaps they are beautiful everywhere and we have been rising especially early to catch them lately. This past month we have been working really really really hard to finish our timber frame and get it erected. So we have been following the advise of that wise man Benjamin Franklin, "early to bed, early to rise..." which is easy to do without electric lights to keep us up at night! The weather has been in our favor, with cool nights and mostly sparkling warm days, full of wildflowers, hawks soaring overhead, Monarchs migrating through (turns out one of their favorite flowers to feast on is rare Blazing Star of which we have a whole meadow of!) Our wonderful neighbor Beth has been helping us on the frame cutting (see the lovely lady winding up for a swing below) and truly an arsenal of talented, generous community members have been accompanying us every step of the way. We are so blessed. A friend recently told me about a Native American community he had spent some time with, where he learned from an elder that when they are taught how to pray, it is never to ask for what one needs, since we already are surrounded by everything we need on this earth, but rather they are taught only prayers of thanks. I can feel the truth of that these days...

 

     

        As you can see, we have been doing quite a lot of chisel-and-malleting of joints, positioning and marking timbers to be jointed and then lifting logs on and off the framing bed. There have been days when I couldn't have been happier than sitting in the sun, tapping away a perfect connection for hours, and more lately me and my aching wrists have been very ready for this phase of our project to be over. What has helped a lot in this endeavor have been timber dogs and temporary pins that our neighbor Brian blacksmithed at his forge for us. The timber dogs act like giant staples to keep heavy logs from rolling. I finally got a photo of Brian at work, making something far more beautiful than our practical basic tools. Also a key tool has been pevees or cant hooks, which enable one us alone to roll the giant weighty logs around, in and out of position for micro adjustments to the joints. But enough of this talk! We just finished our last bent/section on Saturday! Woohoo! On to the lifting party!

Timberdogs holding tie-beam to crucks

       

      Another friend I have been feeling a lot of gratitude for this past week has been our neighbor Ethan, who this past week helped us pick out our ridge poll and two sill beams from a nearby mature forest of oaks and hickories. We needed a straight, 36 ft. tall, relatively consistent diameter tree for our ridge poll and Ethan was the logical person to turn to since he has been practicing and teaching sustainable forestry ever since he lived in France and was on the woodsmen team at The Arch (radical simplicity community). Everyday he would go with a team of men and fell trees with only saws and axs, then section off, split and stack firewood for the community's winter use. It took us hours to pick out our three trees and then many hours more of cutting and felling them. All three got snagged since the forest is fairly dense, but we ended up with a shagbark hickory, a black oak, and a red oak. Our Amish neighbor Jake then took over with his team of Belgians and pulled the massively heavy timbers to our land nearby, bless their hardy horse hearts! 

 
     Then Mike and I took over with our old familiars, the drawknives, and spent a good many hours stripping bark and preparing the ridgepoll for our upcoming raising day. It has been a year since we stripped our last sixteen logs and I was reminded of how grueling that task can be, and how far we have come. Our great hope is that on our raising day, some kind folks might feel inspired to whittle a bit on the two wall plate logs, since we have a combined 72 ft. more to debark!

      That brings us nearly to the present... As we got closer and closer to finishing our last section, we have had to start planning the next phase. The terrifying-moment-of-truth phase when we see whether our frame will stand erect or tumble apart in front of all of the eyes of our friends and neighbors! Part of getting ready for the day has meant having a "lifting day" when we reassemble all of the sections and get them in position to be lifted on raising day. I have been a bit anxious for lifting day, since I hadn't really been able to conceptualize how it would all be physically possible. Sure, we have been able to lift one log at a time with six to eight people, but would the joints line up again? Could we lift combinations of logs and how would we brace each section to get it pivoting off the ground? Could we do all of it in a morning and feed volunteers afterward? On top of worrying about all that, we had to scrounge up twenty straps, twenty-six pins, disassemble the framing bed, juice up the drills.... Oh, and get enough volunteers to come. Turns out, this time of year is a busy project time for just about everyone, and we had a hard time coming up with even eight people! The morning of, we weren't sure if enough people would show up, but somehow we seem to always get the perfect help for the task at hand, and our lifting party was no exception! Thanks especially to our neighbors at the Possibility Alliance who sent four volunteers to our rescue, we were able to do all of the above with muscle to spare. The framing bed came down, the bracing came together, the first bent was a bit touch-and-go but once we got it together, it took us only twenty minutes to assemble the second and then fifteen for the third, followed by a perfect-amount-of-food lunch. Then three folks had to leave, leaving only five of us (plus Mike the non-lifter) to assemble the last one. We contemplated sitting around for an hour until more volunteers would be able to come, but we decided to just try it, and guess what? We did it, though with no muscle to spare. It was a group high-five moment for sure. Wow. So we are almost ready for our raising day, which we have set for Saturday, October 5th. Everyone in our community has been invited and we are now hustling to get our last details in place, our final tools, ropes, our work site ready for the day. By our next post, we should have something resembling a house standing upright... So if you happen to be passing through northeast Missouri this coming weekend, stop on by and join the moment!

 

The hottest day

    
     Today was officially the hottest day of summer so far. Over 100 degrees, capping off a week of sweltering high-ninety weather. It hasn't rained in a month and it would be fair to say that we have been feeling a bit wilted during our first week back in Missouri. Has this fact, or Mike's neck injury, set us back on our homesteading plans at all? It would any sensible person, but not us, since apparently we are unreasonably hardy and determined. Usually we would not have pushed as hard as we have this past week, but a rare opportunity presented itself... we were offered the help of a work party of volunteers on Friday, which meant that we had five days to finish the timber-framing section we were working on before we left if we wanted their help moving it and setting up the next section. "Yes!" I foolishly thought, "let's go for it!" Our amazing, fearless, slightly-crazy-like-us, homesteader/builder neighbor Beth volunteered to help us build this week and offered up her strategy for beating the heat... get up and start work at 6 am, go until noon, quit until 4, and then finish when you can't see anymore, around 8. So that is what we did, all this week, hammered and chiseled and sawed our butts off, heat be darned! (In case you are reading this and having alarm bells sounding in your head regarding Mike's mending neck, be not alarmed, he sensibly did not push himself as hard as Beth and I and resigned himself to cook duty and what you might call "timberframing-lite," the detail work minus the heavy lifting).

Proof, thanks to our neighbor Beth

  
      The 6:00 AM strategy worked well, giving us two sweet hours of cool work weather before the sun reared its blistering head over the tree canopy to start its daily frying. Beth had another great strategy for this stage of the day, which is to jump in the pond with your clothes fully on and then let yourself air dry. Strangely, this works wonders, producing literal air-conditioned cooling as the water evaporates in the breeze. Repeat every hour as needed, and we got ourselves through the day. Last night, the night before the crew was to arrive, Mike and I succumbed to power-tool temptation and finished trimming the legs of the section with a chain-saw and power grinder, a much more expedient version of what we had been doing with hand saws, but we were finally done. Whew! I don't think we will be choosing to work under such pressure again. But as you can see in the photos below, the work party came and moved section #2 (first picture above, laid out on pallets) and set up section #3. We celebrated afterward with watermelon in the shade, which always tastes so much more sweet when it comes after a hot day of work. We are taking the afternoon and weekend off to let our blisters heal, though I can hardly imagine picking up a chisel again come Monday. Still, we are getting much better and quicker as we go. Within a month the frame will be standing (God willing!)

    Some folks from the work party also helped me go around the do triage on our little tree saplings who are badly in need of water. We hauled buckets of water from the pond and got a good section of them watered, but we could really use some rain soon. The ground seemed to suck up the water, sometimes with an actual gurgling sound as it ran into cracks. It is hard to see their little leaves drying up or turning fall colors prematurely. Part of our planting strategy was to plant twice as much as we hoped would make it, knowing many wouldn't, but of course I have been hoping they all will anyhow.

     Our pond has also been losing water to evaporation, evident in rings around the shoreline. It has stayed cool enough however to be a refreshing part of our days, and not just ours... We noticed that the number of animal tracks around its perimeter has greatly increased since the creek on our land has dried up, revealing wild turkeys, racoons, possums, deer and others have been also making use of our little oasis. It is sort of fascinating to consider how other life here endures the heat. I think the deer have also been employing the 6 AM strategy as I have heard them snorting at that early hour. We have watched hornets come and rest on the pond surface and then fly away after thirty seconds. Are they cooling themselves? Drinking? I don't know but there are always a dozen or more of them. I also wonder why only hornets? Why not bees? These are the sorts of mysteries that are beginning to present themselves to us as we get to know the land and its inhabitants better...

   
      Last, and best, one of the surprises of coming back this past week was discovering a whole new round of wild flowers on our land that we had never before seen. This was most likely because last year we had such a serious drought that not many wildflowers got to the flowering stage at all, but the abundance of spring rain this year primed a flush of blooms. Purple rough blazing stars are especially abundant, even on hills we thought almost nothing grew on, as well as stiff sunflowers, which grow in thick masses up against the burgundy staghorn sumac. I have used some of these to make natural fiber dyes, like purple ironweed and various sunflowers, as well as the sumac berries. Elderberries are my favorite range of colors, from teal to periwinkles, and Mike has some ideas about making elderberry wine and jelly, we shall see. What the conservation department has told us is that these and other native prairie grasses and flowers all thrive in the hot season, as opposed to cool season grasses like fescue that have been introduced as feed grasses for livestock. So somebody is out there in enjoying the weather! Well, keep fingers crossed for rain and send cool thoughts our way!

One down and three to go

     Now that an embarrassing length of time has lapsed since my last posting, I have positive progress to report on the house construction! We have completed one whole section of four sections (in the timber-framing world they are called "bents") of our main house frame. This first section was a huge hurdle for me personally, since I really had no experience cutting this kind of joinery, only having ever worked with squared-off timbers before, AND there was the seemingly insurmountable problem of actually lifting and maneuvering the massively heavy timbers on and off the framing bed! But once we started in, we slowly and awkwardly figured out how to cut each special joint (the notch made where two timbers come together) and we found friends who liked us enough to come help us lift the aforementioned massively heavy timbers each time we needed to add a new piece (6-8 able-bodied men/women on average!) When we finally finished one whole section, we had a big lifting party to get it off the framing bed and onto the ground so that we could set up the next section, which is already underway, about half finished. So below is a picture of the relocated first section, ready to be adjusted and ratchet-strapped in place for our future raising day when all four will go up together.... or so we pray.

     We have been doing all this work on the "framing bed" that we constructed especially for the task, a perfectly level and purposefully-spaced grid upon which to lay out the timbers. It helps us determine at what positions to line up the beams in order to get consistent heights for the first and second floors, to know where the cruck timbers should cross to support the ridge poll, and where the feet of the building will stick out and sit on the padstones we set last summer. It has been surprisingly solid, though it looks like it should collapse under the weight of several tons of timber. See picture below... We roll around logs, pivot and push them into and out of place to cut the notches, and it has not budged! When we are done this phase of construction, we will dismantle it and reuse the wood we built it with to construct our first floor joists. 

     We have been doing all of the construction at this phase with only a few key tools: mainly chisels, mallets, saws, levels, a string, and the tool that I am using in the below left picture, a scribing compass. This was one of our big investments for this project, but it is a very cool tool and well worth it. Once set level, it can be used to transfer the curve of one timber onto the one below it and vice versa. Knowing this allows us to remove wood from both the bottom and top timbers so that they will fit perfectly together, despite the irregularities in the contours of their curves. We end up with each joint being somewhat like the one shown bellow, with several flat parallel planes being cut so that they connect flush with the ones in the connecting timber. The dove-tail shape helps transfer any sideways pressure from the cruck into locking the joint more securely together (and prevents them from slipping out), PLUS the peg hole you see drilled here will eventually be filled with an oak peg, which further secures it together. For the raising and this phase we have been using removable metal pins which our very talented blacksmith neighbor Brian custom made especially for this project. Thank goodness for all of our hands-on friends!

The mallet is one my grandfather used to make wooden sculptures

     One of the other projects we have been working on this summer has been building a dock into our pond. One day a few months ago as were watching the spring rain rapidly filling the level of the pond, Mike got a certain look in his eye and determined it was time to get the dock in before it was too late! Within a day or two, he had located rot-resistant white oak from our land and had set it into the ground to form the moorings of our soon-to-be dock. We then ordered some planking from one of our local mills and had it nailed in, just in time for the summer heat wave to hit. Almost as soon as it was done, our friends from Philly came out on a camping adventure with their two boys, Nino and Niki, who were in the water almost non-stop. Our neighbor's daughter Ella and another few community kids, Etta and Oliver, plus Nino have all been learning to swim this summer and our pond has turned out to be the perfect spot for it since we have a bit of a "shallow end" where they can practice. This was an unanticipated additional benefit to add to the list of why having a pond is amazing. We also have been using the water to keep our new little trees alive during dry spells, plus hosting a healthy frog population who saw the "vacancy" signs and moved right in. 

Sitting on the dock of the bay...

Nino and Niki, our resident frogs

     Our land continues to amaze me, week after week, as it unfurls new beauties to behold. This summer, it seems, has been entirely different than last when we had a bad drought, as the wetter weather has brought out terrific wildflowers that I had not seen before, coneflowers, oxeye daisies, bright orange milkweed, black-eye susans, blazing stars, etc. It also brought on a surge of mulberries, the biggest, juiciest, sweetest ones I have yet tasted. All the while Mike and I were planting our hundreds of little trees, including 25 native mulberries, it turns out we actually have four mature mulberry trees already on our land, full of low-hanging branches and ripe berries! This discovery felt like a little surprise gift from our land, and for about a month and a half, we were harvesting bowls of delicious purple-staining berries. Yum. Between that and the bountiful wood nettles on our land, we were bringing in daily edible harvests. Our little tree seedlings are for the most part doing well, by the way, with about a 5% die-off rate so far (about half that were non-native eastern white pines and fussy flowering dogwoods). In particular, our 25 paw-paws all took to the places we planted them which feels like an exciting victory (they are notoriously bad at being transplanted, and we were forewarned that they would likely not make it). But visions of delectable paw paw fruit (somewhat tropical and custardy, almost like a less-tart mango) propelled us onward. I hope they continue to survive the heat and the deer, who may also have an appetite for paw paw! 

     Another fun experiment in edible planting has been our wheat crop, which we planted as a dam-wall stabilizer while the native grasses and wildflowers get established. We sowed a bag last fall and didn't think much of it until we realized this July that we were surrounded by mature grain-heads full of wheat berries ready to be harvested! We didn't have much intention of actually doing it, until our friend Selma, visiting from Philly, decided she wanted to try it out. So we harvested a couple of bowls worth and went through the process of rubbing out the berries and winnowing the sheaths away in the wind by pouring the berries back and forth between bowls. Amazing how it all works using no fancy machinery, just these ancient techniques! We then tried grinding it in a hand-cranked grain mill, mixing a dough from it and using a sour-dough culture to leaven the dough. Finally, post-baking it became little buns which were quite good, though not terribly efficient in the making.

     Another practice we have started which is relatively inefficient, but still, a satisfying step toward self-sufficiency, has been hand washing and line drying our own clothes. We picked up this double-basin washer at auction, and combined with a washboard, soap and water, makes for a rather meditative ritual. These kinds of additional labor-making practices can quickly fill up a day and when one has a sense of scarcity about time (as I often do), that can be quite frustrating. I can see how my fast-paced, efficiency-seeking, east-coast upbringing has conditioned me to avoid or expedite such labor. I often have to consciously slow myself down and remind myself that I have no deadlines or anywhere to be except the present moment, because I can easily slip into being a multi-tasking stressed-out maniac if I am not careful. So taking care, relishing these little rituals--"chopping wood, carrying water" as it were--is more and more a part of my days as I transition into this liefestyle. Selma and Niki also tried out the old-fangled clothes washer while they visited, and, I think, enjoyed it!  

    So, where are we now? As many people reading this will have heard, while on a family-visit in Ohio, Mike recently broke his neck, an unexpected and serious new development. He is super fortunate to be making a full and relatively quick recovery right now, and we are still figuring out what this means for the rest of our building season (and how soon we can return!) The especially unfortunate bit is that his injury will mean no "heavy lifting" for him for awhile and, ironically, we have pretty much nothing but heavy-lifting ahead of us on the house for the rest of the summer. But I am hopeful I will find help to keep going with it while Mike keeps the hammock warm and the hearth-fire (or cook-fire) burning. For now, gratitude to our bodies that enable us to do this work and keep going, day after day...

Projects beyond projects

    

     This month we've been immersed in the beauty of late spring, fueled by twice the average rainfall... lush, green, croaking, chirping life. The tree frogs have moved in close to our campsite (attracted by above-average bug traffic?) and start up their chorus around 7pm every evening. The whip-or-wills take over at 9pm. Early morning bird song wakes us. Then through the day we have been hearing the geese pass over honking, mostly in pairs, on their way south. Occasionally you can spot a three-some, which our friend (and bird specialist) Richard Crawford has taught us is a yet-to-be-partnered daughter goose who will stick with her parents until she finds a mate. I found this fact to be especially interesting in light of our good friend Melanie Crawford's wedding a few weeks ago. She and Dave Greene were married at the Crawford's farm surrounded by an explosion of iris and roses in the garden, and friends and family helping with a huge outpouring of gifts and support to bring it all about.  (Unfortunately I didn't get a single picture due to the fact that I was running around helping set up and attend the bride.) The event felt especially poignant since she had been living with her parents helping run the farm up until now, and now she is parting ways for Iowa with Dave. A new migration route in the making. But one highlight from the wedding-- our friend Beth brought all dozen of her hula hoops and one of our neighboring Amish family brought all dozen of their kids and the combination was wonderfully hilarious. And then they schooled a group of us in volleyball, which is apparently the Amish sport of choice, go figure. Finish all that with delicious locally-grown and raised food, lemon-curd cake made by our neighbors Brian and Teri, and dancing to a bluegrass band, and you have one perfect day.


   Anyhow, spring is heating into summer and it has sent Mike and I scurrying to finish our last round of "campsite improvement projects" to prepare for both coming guests and summer heat. We learned last summer that a cool shady spot is key to surviving the mid-day heat, so this year we cleared out the brush (read: poison ivy) under a tree grove and mulched and hammocked it into a little shady oasis for eating and hanging out.

    We have also working on some small garden beds, both at the Crawford's farm and this salad bed at our campsite, which is mostly lettaces, kale, collads, and a few tomatoes and peppers. Come to think of it, one can grow quite a lot of food in something the size of a large dining table! Hopefully we will get the most of it and not the rabbits...
     We also extended the roof of our little living shed to block out morning sun and rain, which was beginning to render it quite uncomfortable. Your can get a sense of the campsite-sprawl we have going on, laundry hanging everywhere, carpentry projects continually in the works, lots of herbs, flowers and such in whatever pots I could find to tuck in here and there, always dishes and to-do lists and books, etc.... When we start hearing a storm approaching it is quite the scramble to get everything put away and under cover before ducking into our tent, which stays (mercifully) dry!

     Another project that I have been itching to tackle for quite some time has been our jumble of a work shed. I finally built in some shelves and bike hooks and shock-le-bleur! One can actually now find the right tool when one wants it. I realize that much of what we have been working on up until now is getting our systems down. Water systems, food systems, tool systems, waste systems, laundry systems and so on. If not followed properly, we can easily find a favorite shirt chewed into shreds by mice overnight (very frustrating!)
     Another little project just completed was clearing a space and putting in a raised tent platform for guests to come and stay, and just in time since we are expecting some folks to come and help out with the main house project. Yes, that is right, we are actually re-starting the main project!

  
      Last, but not least, we have been moving ahead with the house in fits and starts.... This endeavor is the most daunting task of all, really of any building project I have ever tackled, mostly because it is almost unimaginable how we will actually maneuver several tons of lumber into a raised frame! We have almost all the members we need harvested and moved to the site, and we now have a raised, level, building platform constructed so that we can lay out each section and work mark each connection joint in a uniform way. However, actually moving the timbers on and off of it is the worrying aspect, a task we could easily use a 8-person team for! Still, we are finding ways and our first "lifting party" will likely be happening in the next few days. In preparation we have started on the "scarf joints" required to join the floor beams together. One very cool tool we have on loan is a mortising machine, essentially a hand-cranked boring machine. See Mike below in action. It is exciting to be finally taking chisels and hammers to wood... starting our first joints... beginning to craft this wood into our home. Send us wishes for strength and hopefully in our next update we will have something taking house-like shape!

We've got mail!

We finally have gotten around to applying for an address number and setting up a mailbox... and guess what? We got mail on the first day! That is... junk mail (ugh!) So we thought if we actually let someone know our new address, then maybe when we open our mailbox in the next few weeks there might be something more exciting than coupons in it? Here it is, hot off the presses--

Mike Patterson and Julia Jack-Scott

27660 Frontier Ln.

La Plata, MO 63549

And PS- it is Julia's birthday on the 21st :) A birthday postcard would make my day!

Planting and storing

 

      

      Spring is finally here! For weeks we were watching for the moment when all the bare tree branches would leaf out and turn green and all of a sudden, we looked around and realized that it had happened, that the forest was a light shade of green instead of brown. It is a pretty miraculous process to see a bare stick form a tiny bud and then watch the bud unfurl into tiny oak leaves. Baby animals are abounding around us-- many of our neighbors have new piglets, pullets (chicks), goat kids, lambs, calves, and fowls frolicking around, rendering everything a little picture-postcard perfect. The only babies we seem to be harboring on our land are tick-babies, but that is okay, one day we will have more animals! In the meantime, we have started working one day a week at our friends, the Crawford's farm, Butterfly Hill Farm, which is a much more established version of what we are working on ourselves. Richard and Glinda are both retired from university careers and are both a wealth of knowledge on native and garden plants, animals, birds, and much else. As Glinda is recovering from a long struggle with cancer (and Richard as well, as care-taker), and they are preparing for their daughter's wedding on the farm later this month, they both felt the need for additional hands preparing their land and gardens for spring. And since we adore them, and are eager to learn from their experience, we stepped up to the job. (Pictures of their gardens below and above and more to come in the next post from the wedding.)

    Meanwhile, the Crawfords offered us use of part of their garden beds to plant some of our own veggies this summer, while ours are still getting established, and we have jumped at the opportunity. We started some plants from seed and have been nursing them along through random late frosts (May 9th?) and blistering days of sun to the point where they will leave their little plastic cartons and become one with the earth. It has been hard to limit ourselves to only a few easy plant varieties, since we are now cooking out at our land and are somewhat limited for fresh produce. "One day..." we keep saying, "we should really focus on the house this summer..." Sigh.

And yet! One thing we really went for this year, and could very well be the major theme of the last few weeks, has been tree planting. Missouri's conservation department has a very amazing service where one can pre-order and purchase native tree starts from their nurseries for, well, .33 cents a tree! What a deal! Last fall we went in with our neighbors on a big order and ended up with 350 young Persimmon, Wild Plum, White Pine, Redbud, Flowering Dogwood, Paw Paw, Serviceberry, Mulberry, Choke Cherry, Black Locust, Elderberry, and Nannyberry tree that arrived in the mail three weeks ago. I am not sure what inspired us to such an ambitious order, but it has been quite a lot of work to get them all in the ground, watered and mulched! Still, it has been a good process for us to go through, envisioning natural privacy screens, windbreaks, firewood coppicing and edible gathering paths through the land, plus of course, an abundance of spring blossoms for bees and beauty of course. The best part about it all has been actually having a water source to pre-soak and water them with. We keep repeating to each other, "I'm so glad we put in the pond last year...", since we not only use the spigot all the time, we also now have a spectacular sunset view over the pond were we rest our weary bones at the end of each day and pause to watch the sky turn colors. Such a sweet world.

    We have now been actually living on our land a little over a week, thanks in large measure to Mike's rain barrel and water filtration set-up that he has been working on. I realize that much of what enables us to live on our land is our ability to store food and water effectively. We have refined our systems greatly since last summer and now we are really self-sufficiently using the natural resources around us--rain and wood from the land--to drink, do dishes and cook food with. Mike figured out a way to use 5 gallon food-grade buckets plus the filtering components from Berkey filters to make our rain water potable. We also found these great twist-off lids for 5 gallon buckets that makes them much more usable for bulk food storage. We put in our first order from the "bulk buying club" that many people in our community are a part of (ordering once a month from bulk distributor UNFI), so now we are cooking and eating our meals al fresco in our little open-air kitchen/dining area. For that matter, we have hosted and fed guests several times now (including a bachelorette tea party), and it feels really good to be able to offer a space and meal to friends. More to come about our rocket stove and sun oven, since they are such amazing cooking tools and merit their own post.
      Though most of this post has been about to-doings on our land, we have involved in a number of great community events that I seem never to have a camera on-hand at, including a May day party (complete with pole and ribbon dancing), a contra dance in the Duplex structure that I worked on two summers ago, work parties, birthday parties, potlucks, and we are about to take a four-day course at the neighboring Peace and Permaculture Center on Restorative Justice being taught by Dominic Barter (an amazing system of communication and conflict-resolution that is spreading around the world). So, more to come soon. Much love to family and friends reading along--spring blessings!