Memphis Democrat
August 20, 2007

Actually no, of course I'm not. Mostly I'm wearing a bright yellow tee shirt I picked up at the Kirksville Salvation Army a few weeks back. It has "E2=D5" written across it. If any of you have a clue what that means, do please get in touch. I understand "Avon Women are Beautiful", as another similarly purchased shirt has it. Also "18th North American Prairie Conference", not least because our Rachel was there, no doubt learning stuff useful for helping look after our land here at Dancing Rabbit.

Last week saw Rory and Panda leave for Orange County, CA, where, once they've exhausted the beaches, they'll start looking for somewhere to live they say will suit them better. We're sure they'll work something out, and wish them luck.

Alline is back for a couple of weeks to work on the Milkweed Mercantile business and to repair her dog: Balloo has licked off most of the fur from his legs, poor thing. Sounds like he's really missed her while she's been away. When I was in my teens I used to pluck my eyebrows when I was stressed, so I can relate. I often hid the resultant bald patch with paint, but Balloo seems yet to have mastered that art.

Our recent additions the Carletons continue to settle in. They're all wired up on phone and internet now, and last time Michelle and I were round there, Tom popped by to show them how to light the shiny red boiler that lives next to the sofa.

We celebrated Ali, Rachel and Thomas' birthdays on Monday with a tropical-themed dance party, pineapples and all. Later in the week Thomas' parents pop down from Illinois for the day to help him celebrate his 28th, bringing with them a fabulous German chocolate cake and a cooler full of beers to share.

The Outside Kitchen saw a lot of canning action this week. Bobolink eating coop are in a tomato canning frenzy, with help from their entertaining hard-working guests Summer and Purl, who are on leave from Twin Oaks, an intentional community in rural central Virginia.

Purl's puppet show on Thursday provided the highlight of my week here, so I'm going to tell you all about it. Scheduled to coincide with the birthday of our Thomas, himself often seen halfway up a tree with assorted glove puppets, it starred various cardboard characters performing inside a small, home-made wooden stage held round Purl's chest with a belt, like an accordion. The backdrop was drawn on a scroll of paper that Purl wound one way or the other as the puppets walked through their home village. Purl's story, performed in front of twenty of us, kids and adults alike, was of Andrew, a half-whale boy searching for his whale mom. On his travels around the village, Andrew heard some of Mr Yippee's wacky poetry, got some clues from Flipper the Dolphin, and donated some sneakers to Mr Ferguson the farmer, who, in addition to the arcade game in his attic, has a large collection of 80's retro sneakers he keeps neatly arranged on shelves in a spare room. Music and sound effects from a kazoo and harmonica added extra magic to the show, the moral of which was that once you accept yourself and your weirdnesses, your instinct will kick in and help you flourish and find what you're destined to do. Which in Andrew's case is to live with his family, Whale mom and all, in a cornfield. Whatever floats your boat.

Back down to earth now, with a bump and a roar and a hiss. The area just north of our Ultimate Frisbee field has this week become a showcase of antique earth-moving machinery. Ralph Erickson and his team have been digging our new pond with an old Caterpillar D6 dozer he restored after finding it in a scrap yard in the 70's. Early in the week, the original yellow machine was joined by his larger D7 model. Clearly still not satisfied with the collection, on Sunday Ralph brought in a scraper hauled by an even larger green tractor, to haul out the black dirt from the pond's center. The sight of this beast rolling past the Common House was enough to bring our meeting about kid/adult ratios to a grinding halt for a few minutes as people turned to stare at what I'm told is the biggest thing to have come on the farm since the Zimmermans' track hoe rescued Skyhouse four years ago.

After another visit to oggle the pond site, Michelle and I this week took a walk up to the old Homestead tucked away in a corner of the farm and had a Mexican-style picnic of boiled corn, boiled potatoes, and boiled eggs. The house was bulldozed under years ago; there's just the windmill left now, and the half-buried remains of what Bob tells us was a "two-headed corn picker". It was good to be sitting in the middle of all that history, however recent. Back in England, until a few years ago, I lived in a cottage that is over six hundred years old, next to a pub built a little earlier, down the road from a church built somewhere in between (the pub was built to feed and water the folks that built the church). I do miss all that old stuff you get everywhere in England, but visits to the old homestead up along Smith Road will help make up for it for now.

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