Managing the Jump from Hyper Space

In two days I board the westbound Southwest Chief (train #3) and start a stretch of 54 days on the road, excepting four days straddling Thanksgiving. I'll be on the West Coast twice, and the East Coast twice. I'll see my son in Las Vegas & my daughter in Toledo, (two cities which have little in common other than being the residence of my children). I'll participate in the annual NASCO Institute in Ann Arbor MI, Nov 5-7, attend the fall FIC organizational meeting (at Mosaic Commons in Berlin MA, Nov 12-14), conduct Weekend III of the Mid-Atlantic Integrative Facilitation Training, and consult with four or five communities along the way. Whew!

While that's a gob of travel and a gong load of reports, the scary part is that this represents a slowing down of my current pace.

This is the busiest time of year at Sandhill, and the harvest continues into the fourth week. Some years, we can get it wrapped up in three weeks; this year it will take five. We've been lucky with the weather and a killing frost has stayed away long enough to allow this year's late-maturing sorghum cane to ripen. We'll have it all stripped and cut down in another 3-4 days, and the final cooking will probably happen next week.

I did my final tour of duty in the food processing kitchen this evening, making one last batch of tomatillo salsa and another gallon of lacto-fermented garlic and hot peppers. It should be ready to decant by the time I'm back for Thanksgiving. (After putting the fermented peppers through a blender, we style the result "Rooster Sauce," in deference to the logo on the popular Huy Fong brand of sriracha, that our homemade product emulates.)

It's hard leaving the farm while there's still crops to bring in, but I have to make travel commitments well ahead of the weather, and nine years out of 10 we're done by Oct 21. This year is the exception. We're in the midst of fall glory right now. When I return, we'll regularly be drinking our morning coffee by the wood stove and winter will be knocking at the door. The daylight hours will be measurably shortened, commensurate with the sharply diminished workload of winter. In the next couple days I need to gather a load of firewood for Ma'ikwe, vote absentee in our county seat, and take care of a dozen other little things that are much easier dealt with in person at home.

I just have 44 hours left of my harvest regimen, where I juggle the happy frenzy of accelerated food processing on top of everything already on my plate—Sandhill meetings, time with my wife, domestic work, relationships at home, yoga, product shipping, FIC administration, consulting logistics, writing, and personal correspondence. When I'm at home, everything is in play. After I board the train however, the first half of this list falls away and my routine shifts into a sequential intensity where I typically prepare for, deliver, and reflect on a single client each weekend. In the interstices I visit with friends, and even have time to read. Or look out the window as a rumble across the country, wondering what's being harvested in the lives of the people whose home I'm passing through. With apologies to Audrey Niffenegger, it's the Time Zone Traveler's Life.

Tiling in the Piedmont

One of the joys of the traveling life is the opportunity to visit friends in the interstices. As most of my work (cmty events, FIC business, or consulting gigs) happen on the weekends, that leaves Mon-Thu free for travel, writing reports, and dropping in on friends. The last four days I've been visiting with Ann Shrader—one of my dearest friends—at her home in Floyd County VA.
I've known Annie since 1969, when we met at a dorm floor party at Carleton College (she was a freshman on 2nd Myers and I was a sophomore on 1st Goodhue). After, as they, "getting together," we eventually wound up together in a group house in Washington DC post-graduation. After that we were part of a four-person group which started Sandhill Farm in 1974. We had a kid together in 1981—Ceilee, who will be 27 on Sunday and a first-time father this coming April. While our lover relationship atrophied and died at about the time Ceilee was born, we remained close and lived together as cmty partners until she left Sandhill in 1999. She departed to get distance from Stan (with whom she'd developed a long-term, loving relationship after me; in '99 they were breaking up and it was too painful to live in the same place).
Now Annie lives 1000 miles away (which has an interesting parallel with my wife, Ma'ikwe, who also lives 1000 miles from me and shares Annie's birthday—what's up with that?), and I look for opportunities to get together with her whenever I have reason to be near Virginia.
I helped Annie buy the house and 2+ acres she's been living on at Left Bank Land Trust since 2002. It's in the piedmont just below Roanoke in the Blue Ridge Mts of southwestern Virginia. As happens, one starts to take a different attitude about housing when you own it, and Annie's been gradually upgrading her digs since getting title to them. Fixing up her bathroom has been right at the top of her Home Improvements List, and I had made a commitment years ago to tile her bathroom floor. The last few days we actually did it.
I love doing home construction projects, but over the last couple decades I've gradually moved away from working with my hands and toward working with my fingers (at a keyboard) and my mouth (facilitating, mediating conflict, and public speaking). All of which is to say my hands are blistered and sore today after custom nibbling tile all day yesterday to fit into non-square corners and around the toilet. But I also have the satisfaction of seeing the finished product, and delivering on a promise—for the rest of her life, Annie will walk on the bathroom floor we did together. It'll be one more reminder of our richly intertwined lives. (Physical reminders of connected lives are important icons, helping us evoke the relationships which sustain us. And unlike most of my current work as a cmty networker and process consultant, with construction projects you can actually tell when something is completed!)
This afternoon I'll drive to Asheville, where I'll have a weekend of consulting, followed by several days of catching up with friends: Jo (my daughter), Susan Patrice, Terry O'Keefe, plus ex-Sandhill members Jess Mund, Michael Penniman, and Jessie Thornwaite. But before I depart, Annie and I will grout the tile, re-hang the bathroom door (now a bit shorter), clean up the tools, and have a batch of homemade waffles.
As I think about it, tiling is a great metaphor for my life, which I piece together one person at a time, fitted into a whole and cemented by social connections. Sure, there are blisters from time to time and occasionally I break a tile in the wrong place, but these things are always reparable if you're willing to pay attention. It's a great life.