I brought you to the river to watch the fish swim by
and lay around that grassy bank and breathe in that blue sky
I brought you to these waters to see what you could see
the difference in the two worlds can’t help but frighten me…

- The Avett Brothers

Autumn has arrived… at least at my parents’ house, where trees started shedding their leaves and seed pods simply for Hazel’s amusement and collection, it seems. Time to listen to cool-weather music, button up, cut off all of my hemp bracelets until time to make more next summer.

Several years ago our friends Eric and Colleen started working out a vision of a new work farm / intentional community in West Virginia. Though Chicago natives, they had both served at Nazareth Farm and were modeling many of their ideas around their time spent there. Five years ago, all of their planning and praying and networking and connecting and money-saving and falling in love with WV paid off, and Bethlehem Farm was born. Their first baby.

This September they will welcome Miriam or Isaiah, their second “baby” and first child. Kelly and I took Hazel and Xavier down to the farm over the weekend for a blessingway for Colleen, to fit in a much needed break from reality, visit with the ones who are the friends – you all have these, right? – who seem to Have It All Figured Out And Do Everything Exactly Right And In The Simplest Possible Way. There is nothing these people do without first contemplating how it will affect their immediate community, the earth, and humanity in general. They know the origins of – if not the actual hands that grew or made – practically every morsel of food that passes their lips. They are humble and gracious and really stinking smart. Eric is a master gardener in every sense of the word, and Colleen makes quilts that could be sold at Tamarack. They are the epitome of People Who Have Their Shit Together. I’m pretty sure that, among other things, it has a lot to do with how little time they spend facebooking (or something like that). If I didn’t love them so freaking much I’d be insanely jealous and probably a little bitter. Which reminds me that, also, they are way better at our religion than I am… clearly. In sifting through photos to share I realize that I did not take any of THEM. Fail. Here they are with Kelly, PJ, and a freshly baptized Xavier. I miss PJ’s huge beard. Eric’s beard is not that huge these days, either, unless it’s just blending with his plaid shirt and looking bigger than it really is – neither is my brother in law’s. There is some kind of beard recession going on.

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
~John Burroughs

The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

(I’ve been thinking about a childhood favorite all summer, and then Erin posted this – this is why we’re friends.)

Music music music, tiny family, far-away friends, cramming into tents to wait out downpours, ice-cold beer, dancing, happy kid, her “I love my life” and everyone else’s “I love mine, too” while passing around a jar of moonshine and bobbing in the coldest swimming hole in Fayette county (at least…)

…bliss that you could cut with a knife.

We’re all stuck in here together like a big family… let’s drink.

…just as fast as my feet can fly…

August, please don’t leave me as fast as July is seeming to slip through my fingers. How is it possible that we were just digging ourselves out of more than three feet of snow and now we’re making piles of stuff to pack for Clifftop, and this morning Maggie and I trekked to our favorite consignment shop to get fall clothes for our little ladies? How how how?

It has been insanely hot for the past couple of weeks, and over the weekend our godfamily came to stay over night as heat-refugees from their inferno of an apartment. We had a delicious feast that reminded me that in the summer, really all I want to do is roll around in the delicious food and mourn the fact that there is no rational / logical way for a family of drifters to put food by for the winter. We just… don’t eat tomatoes or strawberries for months on end. Will I buy a four-dollar pint of strawberries from California in December because my precious, fruit-fly toddler pleads for them with her big brown eyes in the grocery store? Probably… on occasion.

And also, I really just want to have another baby so we can have more compadres. They’re all the fun and awesomeness rolled up in love and funny of real family, but, you know… you hand-pick them. Ha!

(delicious little rainbow of tealights / PJ-homebrew and Kate-made butter / the essence of summer / a feast / ohmygod I love comparing the aesthetics of a meal on several different colors of Fiestaware / the g-fam)

Bring a song and a smile for the banjo
Better get while the gettin’s good
Hitch a ride to the end of the highway
Where the neons turn to wood…

- CCR

(I know that song is supposedly about draft-dodging, but really, I just feel like it’s about summer.)

Listening: CCR
(I am) Reading: Never Let Me Go (which so far I totally do not understand, but it seems really amazing in a The-Giver-for-adults kind of way, possibly…)
(Hazel is) Reading: Freight Train
Working on: random little things – I need to try to make Hazel a strap for her little toy banjo, but I’m still pondering this one. Sew? Crochet?

The past couple of weeks have been so busy and so strange and I feel so mentally unhinged that today I organized, purged, and then rainbow-ordered Hazel’s books as a means of destressing. It worked wonderfully.

EmmaLee & Hazey reading my current favorite & most perfect & wonderful book: All the World. I was so taken with the text that for the first twentysomething reads I overlooked the illustration of a breastfeeding mother (not uncommon for me to see in real life, so it didn’t register for awhile that it’s so uncommon to see in a BOOK). Also: community, various family arrangements, farmer’s market, old Volkswagen bus, dogs, peace and fiddling. What else do you need?

Slip, trip, stumble, fall
Tip the bucket, spill it all
Better luck another day, all the world goes ’round this way

I can think of about 47 adults off the top of my head who could benefit from reading this book :)

Tonight I’ll dream while I’m in bed
When silly thoughts go through my head
About the bugs and alphabet
And when I wake tomorrow I’ll bet
That you and I will walk together again
I can tell that we are gonna be friends
I can tell that we are gonna be friends

- The White Stripes

It’s summertime
And the living is easy
Fish are jumping
And the cotton is high
Your daddy is rich
And your mommy’s good looking
So hush pretty baby, don’t you cry

One of these mornings
You’re gonna wake up singing
You’re gonna spread your wings
Take to the sky
But till that morning
There’s just not a thing that can harm you
With daddy and mommy standing by
- Nick Drake

(Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Hazel has been asking for this book at least twice a day for a week.)

It was their fourth try to find the four miners missing since Monday’s explosion killed 25 others in the nation’s worst underground disaster since at least 1984. During the previous rescue attempt, searchers were forced to withdraw by dangerous gases and the risk of fire or explosion.

Before that, apparently over Easter weekend, he wrote a letter to his mother, his fiancee and his 19-month-old daughter, telling them that he would be looking down from heaven if anything happened to him.

Story here.

If I had the money to do more than just feed them
I’d give them good learning, the best could be found
So when they growed up they’d be checkers and weighers
And not spend their whole life in the dark underground

This and this.

When the whistle blows each morning
And I walk down in that cold, dark mine
I say a prayer to my dear Savior
Please let me see the sunshine one more time

When oh when will it be over
When will I lay these burdens down
And when I die, dear Lord in heaven
Please take my soul from ‘neath that cold dark ground

I still grieve for my poor brother
And I still hear my dear old mother cry
When late that night they came and told her
He’d lost his life down in the Big Shoal Mine

When oh when will it be over
When will I lay these burdens down
And when I die, dear Lord in heaven
Please take my soul from ‘neath that cold dark ground

I have no shame, I feel no sorrow
If on this earth not much I own
I have the love of my sweet children
An old plow mule, a shovel and a hoe

When oh when will it be over
When will I lay these burdens down
And when I die, dear Lord in heaven
Please take my soul from ‘neath that cold dark ground

Yeah, when I die, dear Lord in heaven
Please take my soul from ‘neath that cold dark ground

- lyrics by Dwight Yoakam, performed in the above link by Gillian & Dave Rawlings