Yet again it seems I have waited so long to post that I cannot possibly do justice to all the fun and awesome things that have happened. I think I will just start with the most recent events and work my way backward to fill in the month long gap.
This last Saturday was the sorghum festival at Sandhill Farms, one of the neighboring communities. They started as a legit hippie commune way back in the seventies and support themselves by growing, harvesting, processing, and selling sorghum as well as honey and horseradish and a few other odds and ends. The festival included a hayride tour of the fields and a demonstration of the pressing and boiling down of the juices. It was pretty impressive. There were also garden tours and apple cider and candle making demos and lots of lounging around enjoying a beautiful day with beautiful voices singing old-timey songs.
The day before that was the annual Land Clean day here at dancing rabbit. Everyone spends the morning cleaning up different communal areas and then after lunch everyone focuses on cleaning up their own warren (it's Dancing Rabbit, so the people are occasionally called rabbits, and since rabbits live in warrens, that is what they call their individual plots of land. Strange, I know, but you get used to it.) I had a pretty fantastic day. I got to spend most of the morning splitting wood for the winter supply for the common house. You may recall me raving about my first experience with this a few months back, and sure enough, I still love it. Getting pretty good at it too. Since my muscles seem to get tired long before I get bored, I've even been working on my ambidextrous maul swinging skills and they are progressing quite nicely. My afternoon was spent with the wonderful combination of yard work and power tools. The Mercantile wants to have a demonstration garden next year so I started preparing a good size plot for it by laying down cardboard and then adding a think layer of mulch on top. By the time they are ready to plant, the grass underneath will have died and nice new layer of compost will be on top. The other big project involved building stairs. Last week one of the ladies had mentioned that the stairs for the humanure compost bins were so far gone that they weren't really usable, and that though she'd love to help, she just didn't have the know how to fix them herself. Fortunately I do and I also love few things more than teaching women about tools. We got to use everything from cats paw to circular saw to nail gun and ended up with some much sturdier steps.
Let's see, I gave blood last Tuesday! Again, probably strange but I really do love giving blood. I think this was the first time I had given since I stopped eating much meat, and I was pleasantly surprised by how great I felt afterwards. Not dizzy at all and not really even noticeably tired. Yay!
The Wednesday before last I joined a bunch of other people for an excursion into Kirksville (about an hour away) to watch some Chinese Acrobats perform at Truman State University. It was quite a treat. They did some seriously impressive, not to mention nerveracking, stunts and it was oddly fun to be in an auditorium full of average people who shower daily and wear makeup and crazy things like that. I even had the oppertunity to use a flush toilet for the second time in two months. Yeah, it was big night.
AH, here's a good one. I finally got to fulfill a long time dream of mine- phonetic scrabble! Here's the thing, I love scrabble, but I am really rather pathetic at spelling. This frustrating combination led to the envisioning of a magical game where as long as you could site examples and convince the majority of players that the letters you played could be pronounced as the word you want them to be, it counts. At long last, I found a group that was willing to give it a shot, and sure enough, it was everything I had ever dreemed it kood bea ("ee" as in seemed,"k" as in kale and "oo" as is hood, and "ea" as in flea.)
The underbrush, namely the poison ivy, have lately died back enough to make the forested areas reasonably traversable. One day, while exploring the forgotten area behind my tent, I stumbled upon some abandoned looking shiitake logs. After much asking around, I finally found the original owner and turns out they were in fact old and forgotten and since she hadn't even realized they were still producing, she was more than happy for me to do the harvesting. Several of them were already way past their prime, but I had a blast harvesting my first ever shiitake mushrooms and dinner that night was especially tasty.
For a couple of weeks, the Mercantile pretty much shut down and took a vacation. Since the store was rarely open and we weren't having guests, there really wasn't much I needed to do. So that I didn't just have to cook for myself every meal, I ended up floating between project sites exchanging labor for food. It was great! I think I worked on about every project and did everything from gardening to plastering to laying foundation footers and hanging drywall.
To back up a bit more, the reason the Mercantile was taking time off was because they needed it. Unfortunately, the reason they needed and deserved a respite was because the week before Dancing Rabbit had had to bury one of their well loved members. It was the first death the community had experienced, so on top of all the grief of losing a friend to a long fight with cancer, they had the additional stress of figuring out all the logistics and regulations for transporting bodies and for natural burial in Missouri. It was strange being so close to all the preparations for someone I had never met, but at the same time it was really quite beautiful to watch as the community members helped pull each other through it. It was by far the most participatory funeral I have ever witnessed (over a dozen people spoke in the actual service) and it was clearly cathartic for the friends and family to have a chance to do the things that the funeral industry has slowly taken away—selecting a site, digging the grave, sewing the shroud, arranging the service however they saw fit. Here's a link to the obituary that ran in the local paper in case you want to read more about her: . So yes, after the emotional exhaustion of mourning and the physical exhaustion from taking care of a full inn of family members, it was time to close up shop and recoup for a while.
It was also about that time that the feilds turned into a sea of yellow and white flowers and the monarchs decended in mass. You could just stroll into the prarie, and count eight or so buterflies on any given bush. It was breathtaking.
Well, I think that takes us pretty much back to where I left off last time. It is hard to believe that my time here is already drawing to a close. This week will be quite busy as we prepare for and host a cheese making workshop, but about a week from today I will be heading home.