Memphis Democrat
August 15, 2002

This past week was pretty quiet, maybe the calm before the storm. We've got a lot of people arriving soon for a variety of reasons, so we're kind of gearing up for all the guests and visitors.

Some folks are coming for a special "Family Weekend" when we're having families with kids visit DR together to share their experiences and thoughts about raising kids in a community like ours. We don't have any kids living here right now and we're trying to encourage people with kids to consider moving here. It should be lots of fun to have a bunch of kids here to play with and swim in the pond with.

We'll also have several other visitors next week, plus Kurt and Alline returning, a new intern arriving, and Penn returning with his father. So we'll have a full house! We decided not to do our regular Saturday tour on the 17th because we'll all be so busy with everything else going on. We'll be back to our regular tour schedule the following weekend.

Megan's parents were here this past weekend, and they had a good time visiting Columbia and Kirksville. Rachel came back from her course on mushrooms. She can now identify just about anything you can find around here. Susan Brown is also back from her trip doing personal assistance work in Washington, DC, and New York. Both of them are really glad to be home.

On Thursday, one week after the death of Don's sister, we held a memorial service with some folks from Sandhill to share our feelings with each other and to honor Melinda's life. Betsy played some beautiful flute music, we lit a candle that had belonged to Melinda, and we shared a bottle of her wine. Don told us about her environmental activism and about her playful spirit and loving compassion.

At our regular Sunday meeting we decided to buy a second passenger car. It was a difficult decision because of all the complex social and environmental factors. But with 22 people likely to be here this winter, we decided it would be good to have another reliable fuel-efficient vehicle. We'll winterize it so we can run it on biodiesel like our other vehicles. We hope that with another small car we'll use less fuel than we do now by driving our truck to town whenever we need to bring a lot of people. We've also come up with a list of things we want to do to improve our vehicle cooperative, like working on a "short trip vehicle" that could be human powered or electric, for getting to Rutledge or Sandhill, and possibly building a garage. It's important to us that we take care of the needs of our members while at the same time demonstrating a way of getting around that's less damaging to the environment.

Our peaches are nearly all gone, but the tomatoes are coming in, as is the okra and eggplant. Yum!

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is a nonprofit and a residential community that demonstrates ecological sustainability in Rutledge, MO. We give a tour every Saturday at 1pm (no tour Sat. 8/17/02). Please call first before coming by, at 883-5511.

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