Memphis Democrat Column from August 27, 2006

What a difference a few weeks can make! Here I am typing away on the column again on a cool, rainy Sunday evening. We are all starting to feel perkier now that the mornings, evenings, and nights are a more comfortable temperature even if the days are sometimes more on the steamy side.

Apparently the heavy showers we got in Rutledge on Saturday were not wide-spread. It rained 1.7 inches here in a relatively short period of time. Michael managed to surprise the meterologist on duty in Burlington when he called the totals in since none of the main reporting stations were having any rain at all.

We have been having a lively time here on the farm since Thursday. We are hosting a group from the ICC student cooperatives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They are on a tour of intentional communities in the Midwest and have also visited our friends at Colibri Cohousing in St. Louis and Dancing Rabbit.

Jessie, Cora, Megan, Brian, Jeff and Benjamin have been a lot of fun to have around and have done an incredible amount of work during their stay. They will head for Madison, Wisconsin early tomorrow morning and we will be sorry to have to say goodbye to them.

We have had several other visitors the past three weeks. A good friend that Michael and I lived with at East Wind came by for two short stays on the way up to and back from a car show in the Chicago area. Steve is active in the antique car scene and was taking his 1960 Citroen "Duck", a very unusual French car, to the show. He has visited Sandhill before, both during sorghum harvest and at other times. Steve now lives at a land trust in the Ozarks.

A classmate of Laird's at Carlton College came by with her husband and son. They were on their way from Eugene, Oregon, where they live, to Iowa and Minnesota. One of our 2001 interns, Lisa, spent a week with us. She lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico these days. It was fun seeing her again and she was a big help with the food processing frenzy that was going on while she was here.

We also had a couple of visits from Betsy's friend Sue who came up from Holden, where she is staying with her parents. Sue got involved with the work at Sugar Shack and she and Betsy also made a giant batch of bread and butter pickles.

We hosted a study group from Lawrence, Kansas on August 11 and 12 that is focusing on learning more about sustainable living. Three of the group came on Friday afternoon and moved our beet harvest along before making a short visit to Zimmerman's and then returning to have supper with us. They spent the night at Skyhouse and three more members of their group drove from Lawrence after work and joined them there. The whole group came back for a tour the next day with Laird, another work project and lunch. They spent the the rest of the weekend at Dancing Rabbit.

Jo's mom Elke came out from New York City to pay us a visit and was here for a week. It had been a while since she was here last. I had met Elke briefly many years ago at Twin Oaks and I enjoyed having the chance to get to know her better. Elke jumped enthusiatically into the routine here and obviously had a very good time.

Laird, Jo and Elke left for Virginia on August 16 to attend the Twin Oaks Communities Conference.

When Laird and Jo returned on the 21st, they brought Ann back with them. She spent the night with us before she, Laird, Jo, Ceilee and Ceilee's friend Tosca left for a canoe trip in western Ontario.

Some of the other comings and goings during this time have included Liz going twice to Chillicothe to see her family. One trip was to help her father with his campaign for county judge and the other was to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Sarah and Miles left on the 16th for Chicago before going on from there to a family reunion in North Carolina and and then taking a short side trip to Florida. They returned yesterday morning. Betsy is currently in Arkansas packing up some more of her things and will be returning to take up residence next week.

We welcomed our new intern Billy this week. He lives in St. Louis and was part of last year's sorghum harvest crew. He has recently settled back in the city after travelling extensively for the past few years.

We said goodbye to Jessie and Aradia, who had been living at Sandhill Farm since March. They rode with Sarah and Miles to Chicago before catching the train to Memphis, Tennessee. The two of them are now staying with a friend at The Farm Community and exploring the possibility of living there. Jessie is interested in enrolling in the midwifery program that is offered at The Farm.

We have had a busy period here at Sandhill since I last wrote this column. I mentioned the last time that we were starting the remodeling of Sugar Shack. We have had a great crew on hand to do the work. Ceilee stayed with us to see that the project moved along. In addition to Laird and Stan, the crew included Jo, Rabbits Thomas, Tom and Bob, Eastwind member Kris, along with Sandhill visitors, guests and interns.

The work included dismantling the brick fire box that sat under our old pan, tearing off the roof, raising the profile of a good portion of the building to allow steam to escape and then putting a new roof on the whole structure.

Kris spends two months with us each year at sorghum and has been instrumental in our move to steam. This year, he is overseeing the design and fabrication of our new cooking pan and the retrofitting of the boiler. He is doing some of the work himself and the rest is being done at Hoover Welding in Gorin and Tri-State Welding in Kahoka.

The main part of the remodeling work on Sugar Shack got done just in time for us to do our honey harvest. Stan and Gigi were helped by Billy, Kris, Michael and Liz and the ICC crew. It was a little smaller harvest this time around but everything went very smoothly.

The Ann Arbor group also have helped us harvest and process horseradish the past three days. They were good humored about the tedious work of cleaning and peeling the roots. Stan set up the processing operation this morning and they zipped through the grinding, mixing and bottling.

The late summer/fall fair season is now underway. Jo and Liz took our products to the Quincy Food Fest, which was held in conjuction with the Saturday Farmer's Market on August 5th. The following weekend Michael and I were at the Salt River Folklife Festival at Lake Mark Twain. This is one that we always enjoy doing and there was a nice musical evening with some of the other vendors on Saturday after the fair closed for the day.

We have received some good news tonight. Our interns from last season, Kirk and his wife Chifumi, are now the parents of a daughter. They have named her Aiyume, which means "love dream" in Japanese. The word is that she and Chifumi are doing well.