Time travels strangely here in the village at times. From one perspective, months often fly by me in a blink and I wonder where they’ve gone. From another, I can spend a week watching and anticipating the opening of the season’s first peach flowers, time slowing to a crawl. Sometimes, like this week, I can simultaneously experience both sensations. Ted here at Dancing Rabbit to offer a virtual sampling of the village this week.
The peach tree in question fills the small yard in front of Ironweed kitchen. It was a volunteer that started out in the kitchen’s greenhouse long ago, and we presume that it might have sprouted (in the hard-packed clay, gravel and sand of cob construction debris from which it later had to be transplanted out to the yard) from the pit of a peach eaten during a break in the foundation work back in 2004.
Or pits, as the case may be, for the tree has two trunks and though they have lived as conjoined twins from the start, their respective flowers glow lighter and darker shades of pink and their fruits mature larger and smaller from the different trunks. Both make extremely fuzzy, white-fleshed, freestone fruits of excellent taste and texture that ripen in September.
Though in earlier years the tree flowered profusely every year without fail, lighting up our courtyard for a week each spring, we have not seen it in full flower for several years, as it put out only a smattering of blossoms two years ago, and last year not a single one. We thought it was on its last legs, like other peaches dying of brown rot infections in recent years, until Thomas looked up and shared the existence of a phenomenon in peaches where too much fertility at the wrong time of year, perhaps in combination with rapid drops in temperature over short periods of time as winter comes on, can lead to bud kill. Orchards in Pennsylvania and Ohio had lately experienced this.
This year as the time approached when the peach would normally have been expected to bloom, I watched hopefully, but without too much investment, to see whether the magnificent profusion of flowers might return once again. By the beginning of last week, it seemed apparent that the buds were indeed swelling, and soon they began to show some pink blush.
As the weather took a more seasonally cool tack, the swelling blossoms just hung there, day after day, waiting for more warmth to open. Finally about Wednesday the first few flowers opened out at the tips of a few branches, and Ironweed took its dinner circle-up outside to praise the tree and reach for the sky with it.
By Saturday, open blossoms had grown to number perhaps a few dozen. Sunday morning brought a warm south wind to coax out some more. By midday, there were a hundred. By dinner time they had almost ceased to register as individual flowers and become an uncountable cloud of blooms all abuzz with similarly uncountable bees. A good number of those bees come from my hive across the Holler, adding a new twist of joy to this renewal of life.
If winter is the time for cozying up under blankets in our homes much of the time, we have now thoroughly left it behind, despite the occasional freezing night. As the fields have turned definitively from tawny browns to the most verdant new green growth, so have the villagers re-expanded their homes to include the great outdoors, and I see my friends at work and play everywhere I look.
Thomas and Hassan have each been erecting temples of wood, the bones of structures that will be new permanent features in the villagescape by season’s end. Joe, recently returned from a winter away, is back at his painstaking Japanese-style mortise and tenon work for his own building, passing back and forth to his work site in his trademark bare feet. Katherine, Dan, Sara, Rae, Loren, Alyssa, and many others could be seen beavering away in various gardens each day this week.
After planting out the hawthorn and nannyberry from the state conservation nursery still bundled in our root cellar, I’ll be preparing to focus on starting all the tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers for our garden. Mushroom logs are ready to inoculate as soon as the spawn arrives in the mail, and then potatoes and onion sets will also need to get in the ground. Goats will soon start kidding, and before I know it I’ll be making cheese multiple times a week again instead of once every three weeks.
Some of the most enjoyable moments for me this past week came as I was planting hazelnut, persimmon, and buttonbush along the edge of the draw. Several kids of a family that has visited DR regularly over recent years were in town for several days with their father, and had readily joined our local gang. As the kids roamed on their adventures, I’d heard their voices ranging far and near, but several times I chanced to look up through the still-bare trees as they passed at a trot over the bridged path through the draw, strung along like beads on a necklace. It was dreamlike, is all I can say. Beautiful to watch kids being kids in a place like this.
The first brewing session of the new “brew-op” (brewer’s co-op) happened Saturday, which I only remembered as I was gearing up to head to Quincy for an essential materials supply run with Bear in connection to the house remodel we’re still working on in Rutledge. I hastily apologized, abashed, as I found Cob and Nik washing out vessels at a hydrant at the beginning of a long brewing day. A poor showing on my part, and another aspect of life in a place where there is simply more to do than any one person can fit in a day. I hope that I can make it up on future brewing dates.
Saturday evening the tri-communities men’s group hosted a presentation by the Truman State Women’s Resource Center on understanding sexism, dismantling patriarchy, and being good allies to women. Three folks came out and spoke to a full Great Room in the common house, followed by a Q&A/discussion.
Dancing Rabbit has been an avowedly feminist ecovillage from the start, but what that means to each of us, and how it shows up in the culture of the village, is a bit of a moving target that we have tried to focus more on in recent years. I heard from several folks who felt like the event was a welcome contribution to that, and I was glad of the opportunity to connect more with the wider NEMO community.
With more peach blossoms opening by the moment, I’m off to catch up with all the things that need doing today, and hope all you readers out there are as busy as you want to be in your own gardens and other work, slowly shedding the layers of winter that cling around the edges.
Dancing Rabbit’s first public tour of the season is this weekend (Saturday, 1 pm, open to the public), and our first visitor session is set to start in a couple weeks, so we also hope to see some of you here in the village before long! As always, thanks for reading.
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Last call for Speaking Tour talks and workshops! Would you like to bring Dancing Rabbit’s message and expertise to your community? Ma’ikwe Ludwig, Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage has just a few slots available for talks and workshops in her National Speaking Tour schedule through September 2016. If you’re interested in bringing her to your area, now is the time to contact us to make arrangements!
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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and nonprofit outside Rutledge, in northeast Missouri, focused on demonstrating sustainable living possibilities. Find out more about us by visiting our website, reading our blog, or emailing us.