Memphis Democrat
July 16, 2007

Hello there, this is Toby from Brighton, England, here to pass on this week's tales from Dancing Rabbit.

Along with probably a third of the community, I've been sick most of the week, so to keep you happy I've hired a crack team of reporters to roam the land, with pencil and notepaper to hand. Boots and hard-hats too, what with all the construction going on.

Please excuse me if I use some words or phrases that don't quite make sense to you: I've still a lot to learn about your language. Only the other day I learnt that when you talk about "cream" in coffee, it's often actually just milk. So it goes.

You know, I thought that after being here for a couple of months, by now my head would be full of gardening, construction and vegetarian cooking. But instead, I'm still just settling in, and a lot of my learning has been about how people communicate here at Dancing Rabbit. There's less "I'm right, you're wrong, you need to do things differently" than I'm used to, and in its place more "I need this, you need that, let's see if we can work something out that meets both our needs". It's a big thing, a change like that, but something I'm really appreciating. Not least because I know that without it, noone will last long living in a community as tight-knit as this one.

So first, some coming and goings. Our smiley guests Aaron and Annie have left now, leaving us with slightly less plastering and guitar-playing expertise respectively. And Jan has left us for a while on a big trip. To make up for it all, our new resident Liat arrived from Florida, taking up a room next to mine in Skyhouse. Liat graduated last year, and, thankful to have broken away from college life, has spent most of the time since then travelling around the US checking out other intentional communities. She was originally planning on going to Israel, but when she realised she could find what she wanted in this country, decided to stay in the US.

Another arrival has been a big brown and golden female dog. We don't know where she came from, so if your friendly, cuddly if slightly grovelly dog has gone AWOL, please try us on 660-883- 5511. We can't have her here for much longer. She'll surely miss Bear's dog Thor though, on whom she's developed a real crush. She's quite a young dog, probably with some Golden Shepherd in her.

The Milkweed Mercantile building (www.milkweedmercantile.com) now has its cistern (for capturing rainwater for drinking) covered with a concrete lid, and the adjacent basement is ready for its own lid to be poured, since a bunch of us lifted the wooden forms into place on Wednesday. From my room across the courtyard in Skyhouse I can now see the outline of the building, as there's block laid all along the perimeter. I'd not realised how big this new building was going to be! My mom back in London is cursing local developers for their plans to build a new condo block right across the road from her, which I can understand, but of course here at Dancing Rabbit I'm happy to see the village continue to develop. Not least because everyone has been involved in the decisions along the way. Except me, because I've only just arrived, but I'm definitely excited to have a shop, café and inn on their way.

Nissa, one of our work exchangers, found driving a skid steer around for the Milkweeds site a particularly empowering experience. "Working on this project is excellent training for novice builders", she says.

Wednesday also saw a truck-load of gravel arrive for the floor of Ironweed's new cob kitchen. Meanwhile, that afternoon's "plaster party" at Bear and Alyssa's house, 'Larkspur', saw over twenty people, including some neighbours from Sand Hill community, stomping clay and patting plaster for most of the day, with sun shining and stereo blasting. By the end of it their whole house has had been plastered, with some simple but beautiful colored mosaics in the stairwell. And a few people had got a little too much sun, from what I could see.

Work exchanger Ali's sister Rosa visted for a few days, and along with most of the other residents, enjoyed the spontaneous dance-party Ali organised on Saturday, celebrating everything in general and nothing in particular. She and Tony Sirna delighted us with some of their fancy hula-hooping skills. One day I'll get to see another of Tony's skills: the other day I overheard him asking Kurt how long the concrete top of the cistern being built for Milkweed Mercantile will be exposed for. Whatever the answer was, his next question was: "Can we skateboard on it?" A healthy attitude to construction sites indeed. And yes, he and a couple others did in fact skate on it, with ramp, tricks, audience 'n all.

Visitors Matt and Jeff have had their final week here. Last I saw them we were all part of a "web swarm" busy with our laptop computers tweaking dancingrabbit.org to make it easier for users of Google and other search-engines to find our pages on natural building, solar power and organic vegetable gardening. The visitors have also been helping with the Mercantile, denailing floorboards and deplastering boards for the walls.

Of course, really the most exciting thing about the Mercantile construction work was accidentally digging up an old Avon "Somewhere Spray" perfume bottle. It's thought it might be over twenty years old. Still smells like perfume. Noone likes it enough to claim it as theirs though; it still sits outside one of our picnic tables as a conversation piece.

Ted, Thomas and others with a head for heights have been seen floating around the streets four feet off the ground. Thomas was inspired to make us a pair of stilts after seeing some in use on a film we watched of some street parties celebrating cycling. As I write I can see the stilts in the courtyard, leaning on the stepladder folks have been using to climb onto them. Looks to me like each stilt is a 10 foot 2x2 with a little platform bolted on to stand on. In his first hour or two, Thomas explained to his small and giggly audience that he was "just practicing falling". Mmm.

Michelle's mum Suzanne and sister Danielle visited briefly on the weekend, dropping off Michelle's soap-making equipment. Watch this space for more soap-making news.

A bunch of us watched the second film in Brian's apocalyptic/dystopian movie series. He showed us "Children of Men", a pretty grim film based loosely on the 1992 novel by P.D. James. When I wasn't being utterly depressed, I was being excited that the main characters were on their way to Brighton, where I'm from, as I was hoping to be jumping up and telling everyone that they were now halfway down Bond Street heading for junction with North Street. But they didn't make it to Brighton.

We had much more fun on Friday 13th, watching "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes". Very, very silly indeed. Stop it right now.

Tamar tells me her summer isn't complete without certain pond games being played frequently, which means we need a few more old tractor tire inner tubes to complete the set. So, dear local readers, if you can spare some, please give us a ring and we'll try come and collect them.

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