Memphis Democrat
April 1, 2004

Hey! It's green out there! While we were under all that rain and grey skies, the grass silently sprang up, and this morning when the sun finally broke through, the ground just glowed. Suddenly we can open our windows and listen to the birds without our feet turning to ice.

This is Alyson writing today. Alline is still out in California caring for her parents, and Rachel is getting ready for a big prairie burn next weekend here on our land trust. Lately there have been a bunch of local folks burning grasses, whenever it's not too dry and windy. I'm still not used to seeing all that fire and smoke so close to people's houses. Last week when there was a burn near town, it looked like all of Rutledge was on fire. But all was well, despite my pounding heart.

Lots of Rabbits have returned, after a real quiet week. Sara's back from visiting her family, and is also recovering from the flu she caught somewhere on her trip. Tamar's home from her mother's surprise birthday party, and Jeffrey came back the same day from visiting his own mother and going to a computer conference in Atlanta. He said he learned a lot, and met some people who are actually famous (in the computer world, anyway). Cecil had a good trip to Detroit, where he saw his aunt and our old friends Jacob, Timothy, and little Indigo, who used to live here. Penn's back from visiting friends in Washington, DC (where he got a really cool haircut), and Trish is home from a camping trip to Louisiana with her friend Joseph.

Laura is home, after being in Ohio all winter. We're so glad to see her smiling eyes. It looks like she may be inspiring us with more than her great creative writing -- she returned with loads of art supplies.

I made a mistake last week -- Thomas isn't going to that plastering workshop in Kansas City until next month. Sorry, Thomas!

Susan, Penn, Tereza, Tom, Trish, Tony, Rachel, Don, and I all went to the Rutledge Fire Department barbeque dinner and auction. It was fun to see some familiar faces and enjoy the great baked goods that the local community can cook up. I hope the RFD raised lots of money. They might need it, with all these prairie burns going on.

The sap seems to have stopped running, and it looks like this year was nearly as bad as last year for maple sugaring. There were some good cold nights and warm days this spring, but most of them came after the trees had already begun flowering, and you don't get much sap after that. Oh well, wait till next year...

Ted, Sara, and Tamar are raising some chickens together and sharing the chores as well as the eggs and fertilizer. Those of us who like to eat eggs and be amused by the birds' antics are quite pleased with this development. But some of us don't particularly like being woken up by a rooster before dawn, so the poultry raisers are working to keep the chickens in the pen at night so that the crowing isn't so loud. Unfortunately, one rooster (named Tina because he looks like Tina Turner with lots of frosted hair) much prefers roosting in the top of a thorn tree. One night Ted had to climb up high in the thorn tree, in the dark, in the rain, with a stick, to coax Tina into his arms and carry him down. Now that's community spirit!

When Tamar was in Massachusetts she got to visit a yoga center, and this week she started organizing yoga three mornings a week in the new DR community building. It's a great way to start the day, with the sun streaming in and the body waking up. I wish it was every morning, but I don't know the different positions well enough to do it by myself. Any yoga teachers out there who want to join Dancing Rabbit?

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