The dogs and I went up into the hills above our farm today for a walk. From above, the patchwork of fields spilling from one farm to the next look a lot like they must have looked a hundred and fifty years ago when sheep farms filled this region. Besides the obvious addition of electric wires, the scene has an orderly timeless tranquility of early winter, something it must have had back then. Everything shipshape and ready for snow.

The one thing that always puzzles me as I walk the roads and fields around our farm is where are all the people. No one is ever home. It befuddles me. Morning, noon and night. Weekday and weekend. Our neighborhood is empty of people. Where is everyone? What are they doing? I really don’t know.

I wonder if a hundred and fifty years ago there would actually have been more bustle here. More home fires burning. More bumping into neighbors out doing chores. More community on a smaller neighborhood scale. I would have liked this.

As I think back to the moments I loved best this past year, they were mostly gatherings on a small scale: a winter bonfire on our farmland down the road, a night of song when one of the children’s friend visited with a guitar, picnics in the Arbor Garden to celebrate whatever we could think of to celebrate- a big garlic crop, the safe harvest of all the red shiso, the joyful return of a child coming home from travels or school.

Small sweet moments feel more and more worthy of celebration and gratitude and a feast (when the stove works), because life gives us all a lot of difficulties that make these moments feel more and more precious.

I know I haven’t written many posts this year. We have been wonderfully busy in the office and that was one contributing factor, but another reason was that we had a lot of difficult things happen to us, and it’s been hard to figure out how to even begin choosing words to describe the events.

One particularly poignant event was the death of my brother, Sam. He died this July in a motel room in Nashville,TN of a prescription drug overdose. A sorrowful end to a tragic life. Sam was the funniest person I have ever known and also the source of much confusion and pain for our family when his personality got the better of his heart, and he went off the deep end with drugs and violence directed at my family. Before his decline into drug addiction and desperate acts, he had been Jeff to my Mutt on a spiritual search for how to make sense of our difficult childhood. No one supported me more in my search for meaning. And then he was lost to us in a haze of scary choices. Letting him go when the relationship endangered my children was one of the most difficult and saddest moments of my life.

When he died this summer, I hoped and prayed he had remembered enough from all our spiritual adventures to get himself safely across the astral plane to heaven. When I heard of his death, I asked him to send me a sign that he was okay. That next morning as I walked into the office, a poster fell off the wall. Unbeknownst to me, the poster had an address label from Sam on it. His address on the label? Sunwood Place.

He always liked the razor’s edge between life and death, so it really shouldn’t have surprised me that Sam went on to spend a good bit of this summer and fall sending me wild and crazy signs that all was well with him and he was moving on and making amends. Much as I still feel in a muddle about other members of my family of origin, I have felt close to Sam since his death, and much healing has happened. For that I will always be grateful.

And while I have frequently reminded him and his Angels that I don’t want his imaginative efforts to console me to get in the way of his forward progress as a soul, I also hope he is up there in heaven giving talks on how to let the people left behind know you love them. He really is a genius at this!

Sam wanted fame while here on earth. It was one of many tragic obsessions that made it so hard for him to find his way. Now he is probably playing to sellout crowds doing heavenly stand-up, all the while finally knowing it doesn’t mean anything unless it serves the light in all of us. That was the thing about Sam. He knew exactly how to light everyone up with his humor, yet it all got away from him as darker pursuits prevailed during his life on earth. Thank God he will get more chances to get it right and be his very best self.

I cheer him on from here as he goes about his work of figuring out a new way for himself. And in the small circle of our family, we begin to mend the wounds of his crazed behavior, one small celebration at a time, and we begin to find a way forward that remembers the best in Sam and leaves the rest to God.

Our wonderful motley crew of Thanksgiving participants began to roll in last night bearing traditional Thanksgiving foods like kibbeh, fatoush, zaatar bread, hummus, laban cheese, olives and grape leaves- Yes, once again, long time Green Hope Farm friend and former staff goddess Catherine Boorady brought us a marvelous night before Thanksgiving feast of Lebanese foods.

Today, we have a gathering of friends from Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire bringing foods that reflect their German, Irish, Danish, Scottish, English, Lebanese and Mohawk roots. How I love this holiday and how it expresses our country’s wonderful ability to mix worlds with harmony, enthusiasm, joy AND with delicious results! Yes, I know sometimes we don’t harmonize very well as a people- but often we do, and Thanksgiving is a day when we do it well-

And so I send love and blessings to all of you from one part of the melting pot to yours and I raise a toast to the way we mix worlds and cultures with such wonderfully diverse foods and faces round the table!

PS The dogs here are having to find a melting pot of harmony as well. Here are the visiting and resident dogs’ bowls ready for their Thanksgiving meal!

I know. I know. It IS completely oxymoronic, even moronic, to bemoan the technology of the age while blogging on a computer- But sometimes I do wonder where this is all going.

At a soccer game on Saturday night, I sat next to a college student who clutched two iphones, one in each hand, one of which connected to an ear piece in his ear. I tried to keep my eye on the game but felt a sick fascination at someone who could do so much communicating and apparently make sense, though I must say that the conversation he was having with the 3D person to his right had a sort of autopilot feel, and I don’t think he was noticing the fine points of the game. Nonetheless, he had so many cutting edge communication mediums in play, my head was spinning. And frankly, it was already spinning from an afternoon I’d spent sorting out an enormous collection of Flower catalogs a friend gave me.

As you can imagine, decorating our packages with photos of Flowers requires a lot of photos. When a friend who runs a vegetable and flower stand offered to give me their farm’s outdated wholesale catalogs, I was delighted. During the drop off of this mother load of catalogs, my friend Sarah told me of her consternation about a convention for garden businesses that she had just attended. She reported that the marketing workshops had been beyond frightening. Apparently using designer names for all new hybrid Flowers and vegetables is all the rage.

Just what the world needs, Gucci parsnips.

When I sat down to leaf through all the catalogs, I got the drift. And fast. First, there were virtually no Flowers in the catalogs that I recognized. It wasn’t just the cutesy names like Sweet Carolina Bewitched or Molimba Mini Frizzle Pink that threw me off identifying what was being sold, but the hundreds of pages of glossy shots of Flowers I had never seen in any garden. I even noticed no one calls them Flowers anymore, these species were all referred to as “vegetative growth.”

Personally, I have always enjoyed imagining folks sending their sweethearts bouquets of “vegetative growth.”

I guess those who carry two iphones stay better in touch with what is happening in the agribusiness world than me, because everything I was looking at reminded me of a GM production line. And sounded like it too.

Here are a couple of bullet points from these catalogs and I quote:

“Goal: Provide growers with bulked up, performance-charged, ready-to-go-lines. Fast Tracks TM provide quick turns on 6.5 and larger container and basket production.”

My response? Are tests for steroids needed here?

Or this winner: “Higher profits via upscale, total package solutions including informative, eye catching tags and branded pots,”

And I thought it was the plants that were supposed to be eye-catching.

or my favorite:

“4.25 Grande self symetricize (registered trademark) container and flat filled display tray (patented) uses a unique version of our symetricize system. When used with automatic pot dispensers, containers shift into place perfectly in the tray-without assistance- to align logo and tag locator spots.

Or perhaps because of the automatic pot dispensers, people only THINK the containers have shifted perfectly into place without assistance…

OMG ( I learned about that one Saturday night- it’s the default remark when both of your iphones are blowing up)

Can’t you just hear the plants response? “What are we? Chopped Liver?”

Then there were the many catalogs proudly describing the journey of 10,000 miles that each of their six week old seedlings had taken. Do we all really want to buy plant plugs that start their life in Spain then get shipped to Georgia then trucked to us all before they have their first bud?

I guess the designer labels begin to make sense when you realize that every member of the Rockapulco series on offer has travelled more in six weeks than most of us will travel in a lifetime.

In response, I would like to offer some bullet points from Green Hope Farm:

During the spring, my much too small greenhouse is full of pots that are perched precariously, have popsicle stick labels and do not match.

I do not know what someone means when they say “expands the spring shoulder market.”

I still believe in dirt and seeds and I use them. Together.

My children send me on errands with the family cell phone and I am too embarrassed to tell them I don’t know how to turn it on.

And Jim, if you are reading this blog, I would love a bouquet of Flowers. Spare me the vegetative growth.

And last but not least, Sarah, if you are reading this blog, I feel your pain. And I am not sure a Supertunia named Vista Bubblegum is going to ease it.

November is an oddly colorful time here with brooding purple skies broken by immense flocks of birds and hillsides of burnt sienna oak leaves punctuated by evergreens and the gray brown architecture of leafless trees. It is still sort of a gloomy month though, partly because most of us know what is coming and partly because, as our weather people tell us, it is our cloudiest month with only 30% sunny days.

This 30% number seems like a high estimate to me as I can only recall seeing the sun twice since November started almost a week ago, and then it only showed itself for a few minutes. We console ourselves with brisk walks and a rapt study of the few moments of unusual color- like this flower kale and its pair of intrepid bees.

As we talk to those of you in warmer climates, it begins to be the time of year when we long to hitch a ride in our packages to you for a visit in your balmier worlds. This year, we do have the gift of Thembi to help us see beyond the chill of New Hampshire to the wonder of it all. On the first day there was ice on the koi pond, Thembi came into work in a state of awe bordering on disbelief. She reported that her husband Charles had told her that come winter she would be able to leave a cup of water outside overnight and in the morning it would be ice. She had thought he was teasing her but on that day she had found out this was true. We looked at the koi moving sluggishly below the skim of ice and saw it all afresh through Thembi’s eyes.

At the close of the week, several of us met up with Thembi at a giant used winter clothing and equipment sale. As people raced by with carts full of vests, coats, snow pants, mittens, hats, skiis, snowshoes, boots and skates, we tried to explain to her all the layers she and her boys would need.

Her questions made us laugh at our selves and our funny, funny winter world. How did any of us walk with these big heavy sorel boots on our feet and why would anyone possibly need them? Would she and her boys require snowpants or would activities like sliding down a hill on a plastic disc pass them by. And why would any of us put on those long cross country skiis and push ourselves around a field with sticks? Did even tiny Andile need these big klunky hockey skates and whatever for? Snowshoes? Why on earth would anyone possible need to have such wide feet? For a moment we were all strangers in a strange land, seeing winter, this over the top season, in all its ridiculous splendor.

When summer staffer Charlotte Hastings left for Cape Town, South Africa to work for Grass Roots Soccer, we had no idea our Africa connection was only just beginning. But within days Sithemiso Muhlauri from Harare, Zimbabawe had joined us here at the farm.

Thembi’s husband Charles was the soccer coach for the Zimbabawe national team when he found himself on Mugabe’s list and in serious need of political asylum in the US. After Charles left, it took Thembi three years to get herself and their four young boys out of the country to join Charles. By then, Charles had found a home in our town where he runs the regional lightening soccer program and works at the same school where Ben Sheehan also works.

Thembi and Charles’ eldest son Charlton at 15 1/2 is now in school with William and lifting spirits with humor, charm and a beautiful singing voice. Kudakwashe at 13 is in Jim’s school and Jim tells me he has yet to see Kuda without a smile on his face. Thembi’s Tinashe is 6 and in kindergarten while the youngest Andile at 4 is in pre-school. I don’t know when I have met more adorable and well behaved kids. They arrived in America on the 4th of July. Each has been learning our country ways ever since, and for the youngest kids, learning English too.

And us? We are learning all about life in Harare. Thembi was born in Bheregwani hopsital in Johannesberg, South Africa. Her family’s tribe was the Ndebele tribe which is the zebra tribe. They moved to Harare because of her mom’s work and this is where Themib met Charles who is from a different tribe. Until her early death, Thembi’s mom ran a bus service from Harare to South Africa where her mom’s uncle ran the whole transport business. That this bus service came to be used by most people, Thembi included, to go get food in South Africa when there was little or no food to be found in Harare, makes the whole story a different one.

Thembi has an infectious sense of humor no matter the challenges she is describing. Her boys are settling in happily, and she entertains us each week with descriptions of her adventures as she gets used to living in the country. That seems to be the real culture shock- country life versus city life.

“What is with this need to scrape the icy windows of the car for fifteen minutes each morning?”

In late summer, Thembi would arrive for work dressed to the 9’s. The click of such high high heels had never been heard on our office floors. But soon, it was less than 70 degrees and Thembi started to arrive for work dressed as for arctic exploration. Perhaps the most often heard refrain in the office this fall has been, “Thembi, it’s NOT that cold yet. Save that gear for later .”

When we had snow flurries last week, we all thought of Thembi and her boys. None of them had seen snow before. She was with Andile picking up Tinashe from kindergarten when the first flakes fell, and apparently it was quite a moment for all of them. We can’t wait to see the boy’s delight and Thembi’s surprise when the snow gets serious. In the meantime, Thembi has taken over all restocking jobs from Sophie and is now in charge of keeping all the shipping stations ready to roll.

Right now there is a lot of teasing as Thembi often doesn’t remove her coat even inside because of “the cold.” But even in this, Thembi is teaching us country mice a bit about fashion. Well, at least on the days when it is not seriously cold. Here she is trying to restock with several dogs thinking it is actually their photo moment.

Thembi is wearing a drop dead gorgeous coat and her four foot long dreads are wrapped effortlessly in a stylish chignon. As she is chatting away with me while I try to get a photo, she is no doubt explaining to me the intricacies of iphones, text messages, instant messaging….something foreign to me but not to her.