Howdy y’all. Ben here, shivering at you from the cold, fog-enshrouded rolling hills of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in beautiful Northeast Missouri.
Technically speaking it isn’t winter, but as far as most of us are concerned, it sure feels like it. The past few mornings I have begun the day with the perennial tradition of punching through the livestock water. By the end of this week I expect that my clenched fist may come bouncing back at me, at which point I’ll need to wake up an extra half-hour or so earlier so that I can cover the cooktop of our small woodstove with stainless steel water buckets… some for humans, some for other critters.
I don’t know what I’d do with my life if maintaining a ready supply of thawed water wasn’t a centerpiece of my existence for three months out of the year. There is something about solving problematic natural phenomena with the aid of brains, hands, and physical resources that makes me feel more fulfilled than if I was working at, say, the toothbrush factory. These types of challenges can be as abundant as you wish to make them here, and sometimes they just happen whether or not they’re being sought out.
Being connected to a physical landscape, and my own survival, is its own reward, which is great, because no one cuts me fat checks for slipping in duck manure. In fact, manure is about the only profit we receive from raising ducks. That and the entertainment value. Anytime Arthur is feeling a little cranky, I just park him near the window so he can wave and coo at the old hen ducks that are always out there, staring back at us like they know it’s nice and warm on the other side of the glass.
I’ve heard it phrased by other Rabbits that winter is a time to, metaphorically, charge their batteries. It must have been coined by someone with wind power, as my own small solar-powered home system can attest to. While preparing a meal in the dimness of candlelight hasn’t increased my abilities as a cook, eating in the dark takes presentation out of the equation. A lot of things are just better in the dark. People are more willing to eat turnips if they can’t see them.
With fewer and fewer minutes of daylight, and many of those minutes obscured by cloud cover, I often cannot catch the kind of rays that ensure a steady flow of electrons for my personal pleasure. Which is fine. I have no need to stay up past 8:15 PM these days. I tried to stitch a hole in my pants by the firelight once, the way my granny would have, and ended up sewing the leg shut. Better off enjoying the darkness. There’s a lot of stuff in my house that I like not seeing. Electric light, and the broadening of conscious visual perception it provides in the winter doesn’t feel like a necessity to me, now that I’ve spent so many hours in darkness. It isn’t even a nicety. I’d rather sleep, or listen to the coyotes.
We may not have a lavish amount of amp-hours in our tiny electrical system, but I do carefully tend other metaphorical batteries of sorts. A pig is a wonderful type of battery, a sort of storage vessel for the excess caloric energy of the growing season, infinitely more personable and edible than the types of vermin which sometimes abscond with surplus biomatter before it has the opportunity to compost efficiently in place. There’s a reason kids keep their savings in a piggy bank. This is where the excess goes, to be used in leaner times.
The soil is a bank of sorts too, pregnant with the capital of biota and nutrients to feed and nourish plant life, as well as seeds to re-emerge in times of erosion and duress. Of course, animals and soils alike can be abused when they’re not treated like a savings for the future. There is a tendency these days to cash in our biological investments in exchange for paper money, though I hope not to lay blame on anyone who’s trying to hang in there financially. I’d just rather keep my investments in the form of children, animals, perennial plants, and compost. Though I do enjoy going to our local bank. The bathroom is real fancy.
This past week, in preparation for winter, we’ve finally pulled the ruminants off pasture and have begun haying them in our modest barn. Our sow, Esmerelda, has that special glow that comes with being internally ridden with piglets, we hope. Bearing in mind that the goats have only seen her from a distance of about a thousand feet, we took precautions to provide a peaceful, snug farrowing area in the back of the barn, separate from the herd. In addition, she has a large outdoor run.
While Esmerelda more or less doesn’t give a rip about her new neighbors, the others have a bit more anxiety regarding the new arrangements. Donkey in particular has been giving off some unfriendly vibes, so he has been separated out with a goat friend on his own paddock until he either mellows out or the new litter of piglets has grown big enough to hold their own.
While I am happy for the change in rhythm in our farm scene, the winter does bring about its own list of challenges. In order to feed the pig, I essentially have to run with a bucket of feed past the goats, who know the smell of grain, but seem not to understand that it is devastating to their digestive systems. It’s basically like football, but the turf is more slippery in the manure-stained slush, and the other team has horns.
The goats are also intensely curious about the rainwater tank. The other day the hose was frozen and snapped off in my hand, so now I have to fill water buckets with a saucepan, while I growl at the goats as they attempt to flip the pan with their hooves and snouts.
It snowed here on Sunday, the sort of consistent, wet, large-flaked fluff that looks good from inside, but is way less fun to work in. Raising a family in an unfinished 400-square-foot house has a few challenges, especially when your hand-laundered diapers threaten to freeze on the line and the slush puddle at the front door consumes nearly twenty percent of the floor space. While a lot of folks value the sort of indoors-y connection time that winter brings, I try to find any valid reason to go stand in the slush, where the screaming of children is slightly muffled by our strawbale walls.
The bird scene has been exciting for me lately. Yesterday a bald eagle careened sharply down toward our poultry yard. I picked up Arthur, my ten-month-old son, and dashed through the snow to shake a stick at it, or something. The eagle gracefully ignored me and glided out of sight, but Arthur seemed to enjoy the spontaneity it afforded him.
The gang of crows which frequent the bottomlands provide security against hawks and other aerial predators, for which I am quite thankful. Earlier this week a diminutive sharp-shinned hawk began stalking the chickens, which are probably about twice its size, and the crows seemed to ignore it, but they often give pursuit to the redtails.
My yard is once again inhabited by a motley crew of sparrows, juncos, cardinals, and nuthatches. Once in a while about half a dozen blue jays come by to menace everybody. Drama ensues, and everyone leaves except the old yard ducks, hissing and snapping into the sky. I just don’t need electricity with stuff like this to keep me occupied.
Of course, building an ecovillage is a full time occupation in its own right. While I might seem to lead a charmed life, wringing out icy diapers with my bare mitts, breaking up fights between enormous farm animals, convincing pigs to go places they don’t really want to go, and fielding profound questions that I don’t have the answers to from seven-year-olds who are smarter than me, there’s about a thousand other tasks of vital importance to building this collective dream, in various stages of being accomplished by my neighbors. Maybe we really can do it all, but it might be more fun if you join us.
There’s a whole shifting social-political order out there. It makes me sick to even consider it sometimes. When I add on top of that the physical realities of what humans are doing to their own home, and their own neighbors, it seems like hope and prayer are about the only options left. Living in an ecovillage isn’t an escape so much as an investment in an alternative to an increasingly messy situation. Community itself can be a mess, but at least it’s a fun mess, mostly.
I’ve got a lot of grievances about the state of the world, and at my best I’m able to tell it to the animals, or mutter it while I’m chopping wood, or punching the ice off the diaper laundry. At my best, whatever non-sarcastic, un-cynical ideas I have can be spoken to the kids I’m raising. That seems like an investment worth making to me. It’s about the only thing worth doing after 8:15.
As we head into winter, Dancing Rabbit’s non-profit arm is in the midst of our end-of-year appeal, when we ask for donations to support the work we do. If you’ve already donated, thank you! If not, and you enjoy receiving these updates and want to support us, please donate now!
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and nonprofit outside Rutledge, in northeast Missouri, focused on demonstrating sustainable living possibilities. Find out more about us by visiting our website, reading our blog, or emailing us.