Fall is definitely here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and we’re experiencing a perfect version of it. Warm, but not hot, days; cool, but not cold, nights.
Liz here, bringing you the latest from our village in Northeast Missouri.
We have waved goodbye to attendees of our third and last visitor session, and next weekend will be the last four-day Ecovillage Adventure Weekend for the year. I’ve met people from all over the country, and worked with a few more. I’ve given many tours and taught three natural building classes featuring the straw bale building that I’m building, called the Hub. I’m just about talked out and looking forward to the quiet winter months when things are slow here in the village. Until, of course, boredom and restlessness sets in around March, and I begin to look forward to the start of the next visitor program in April of next year.
It is fitting that I am currently hosting a woman who attended the first visitor session, who has returned as a volunteer to work with me on the Hub at the end of the season. Our tasks are mostly associated with what I call “putting the building to bed,” a phrase adapted from my chef days when it was a kitchen, instead of a building, that we put to bed. Tasks such as painting a second coat of weatherizing liquid on the wood shed. Stacking wood close to the building to feed the masonry heater over the winter. Cleaning up the debris left over from our last big project in September, which was raising the roof structure over the patio.
We had several work exchangers from earlier in the year return to help us with this project, and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a qualified crew. We had three people who could drive the telehandler (the machine that lifts the heavy logs and the 1200-pound Big Mama post into place). The wexers were looking for experience working with round wood and using timber framing techniques to connect rafters to posts and beams. DR Rabbit Alis was the mastermind of this part of the project, and I’m grateful to have someone with these skills in the village, who is willing to share them with others.
A definite pro quality of living in my straw bale cottage, Morel, is the way the bales keep out most sounds from the outside. The con of that, as I found out recently, is that that soundproofing allows an adolescent wood chuck to build a sizeable burrow on the north side of my building, where I rarely go, without me hearing a thing. I was storing some straw bales back there, and he used their tight compression to dig a space in the ground underneath them, complete with multiple entrances and exits. I had my back door open and happened to catch a glimpse of him walking past, so I went out my front door and around back, just in time to catch him fleeing out of one of those exit holes and into the woods in a nearby draw. And yes, I did dismantle the whole thing, thankful he didn’t try to dig a burrow under the house itself.
This weekend I am giving a tour of the Hub to a group of friends and their seven small children who have gathered at the Mercantile Inn here at DR for the weekend as a getaway from St. Louis. They picked a perfect weekend, weather-wise. The coffee group regulars were clearly scared off by the invasion, but I decided to tuck myself into a corner of the dining room with my mug of coffee in hand, and managed to meet some of them.
The Hub tour went very well this morning, with seven kids in tow. Lots of good questions and curiosity, even while watching young children in a non-childproofed environment (no small feat).
And so another fall starts to come to a close. Stay tuned for how the Hub’s first Progressive Fiasco goes on Halloween, where we decorate the patio, preparing for roaming costumed villagers coming by.
Liz Hackney is a regular writer for this newsletter, as well as the editor. She acknowledges the addictive quality of stripping bark off of tree trunks. So satisfying!