Memphis Democrat April 23, 2001

Day to Day Life
Memphis Democrat Column -- Jacob's Travel Logs

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by Brad Jacobson

Rachel and Tony emailed us from China where they are eating a lot of tofu, traveling through huge gorges, and generally having a sweet (and sour) time with the Chinese people. We will welcome them back on May 1 along with Kurt and Alline who have been in the San Francisco area working construction for a month and, as they put it in a recent postcard, "eating themselves silly". In fact, we are awaiting an influx of quite a few people in May, enough to nearly double the size of our group. Jeffrey returned on Friday from a ten-day trip to Seattle to attend a conference of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. He awarded us with stories of the round-trip train ride across America and of reunions with friends from other communities around the country.

We welcomed Rainbow back this week as a resident with a furry feline friend named Bubba Tom Tom. Rainbow has been living for several years in a community called Acorn in Virginia so she is a pro at this kind of living. The initial meetings between Bubba and Baloo and Maya, our dog-residents, have been peaceful with some obligatory chasing scenes involved. We hope for the best. Rainbow helped Sol out this week with the herb garden which is showing signs of life again after the long winter. Many chives have made their way from the garden to our kitchen already.

Tamar cooked up some homemade tofu on Wednesday and made a delicious tofu-pot pie and chocolate-mint-tofu-cream pie, which was quite a mouthful. She and Cedar traveled down the road to Sandhill on Tuesday to help out with a steer slaughter. They skinned it and Tamar awarded Maya with the lower leg which she has proudly carried around ever since.

We sharpened up our push lawnmower this week and put it to work keeping the small portion of our land that we mow under control. We've divided up the lawn into sections and assigned responsibility for each section to a different pair of people. As anyone who has ever mowed by hand knows, it only gets worse as the grass gets higher so there is a strong incentive to keep your portion cut.

On the work front, a milestone was achieved on the construction of Skyhouse as we assembled and raised the final second floor "bents" and laid the last decking down. Now we are ready to assemble and place the seventy-six trusses that will serve as structure for the lofts and roof. We are somewhat concerned about what problems the ceaseless wind will pose as we try to attach these trusses at about twenty-five feet above ground level. Don, Megan, and others were busy digging garden beds this week and planting potatoes, onions, and other crops. We harvested our first batch of asparagus, which was planted two years ago.

Sunday was Earth Day, and even though every day is Earth Day at Dancing Rabbit, seven of us decided to celebrate it by driving to Kirksville in our biodiesel truck and setting up a display table at a Earth Day festival in the town square. Five of us biked back the thirty-seven miles afterwards with the wind mostly at our backs and enjoyed the beautiful spring landscape.

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