In the Early Morning of Summer

Earlier this summer, I stood in the garden behind the caboose, filling a pail with water. I glanced upward and noticed the grapes on the arbor were bigger and very hard green. Soon they will turn purple and burst with the musky odor of wine. When this happens, I pick them and pasteurize juice into bottles. Many clusters of the grapes are wasted
each season, trampled underfoot. The fallen ones will ferment in the heat of summer afternoons. It will smell like wine. The arbor is the only cool spot and people will gather to sit there under the table
and do chores. The air will be rich with the sweat of human work.
An older woman will shell peas while a young girl embroiders raggedy tea towels, sewing daisy chains around the various holes and making a blanket stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying anymore than they are. Nothing is wasted here. A boom box plays fado in the garden
across a small fence which keeps dogs from digging to China by way of the artichokes.Young mothers are weeding and discussing the upcoming concert at Black Oak Ranch, while their fat babies dig in the rich earth with old teaspoons.

This is a small compound of six living places. Everyone has a purpose and a commitment. It took several years of people moving in and around to discover the right combination of personalities. We have children, we have cats, two dogs, a hot tub on wheels that visits different farms throughout our community (you supply the wood), we have elders, well, one now, Virginia at eighty-three is waiting to join Stan at 92 who left us last September. We have a single father and a boy and his dog. Mark cooks every weekend , come eat with us, we are all us and Virginia is teaching women how to make fudge the old way. Our newly weds are smiling. On Friday evenings we stand with candles in front of the hospital with others from our small town and witness for peace. It's time to heal the land before the winter curtain comes down until Spring.

The earth is a thick rich chocolate cake here, where we have worked the soil for years with goat manure or sheepshit. We are growing babies in rows and mounds of earth. It's a happy time for all of us in a place where to compost means to enrich, to grow, to fatten instead of to rot,
instead of to war one against the other. We cling to our ideas with strong hands and thick arms, with breasts full of milk. We are bringing summer into jars and braids of garlic and apples hidden in straw, so that on cold winter days, we can open the plum jam and honey bees will lighten the room with their golden song.