Yes, the weather is always crazy, but everyone we talk to has particularly crazy weather stories right now. We are probably dealing with the most mundane of conditions with just a couple feet of snow on the ground and the usual January chill whereas so many of you have absolutely nutty conditions to report.

As I noted already, crazy weather had affected lots of things in St John. Here’s a bench that is usually overlooking a salt pond not part of the pond.

The unusual weather on St John meant that some Flower friends were more abundant while some were long gone. One abundant friend spoke with me numerous times to say she wanted to help humanity RIGHT NOW because her gifts were perfect for the confused energies of this time. The Flower was Coralita.

I can’t exaggerate how much this Flower loves to love or how focused this Flower is on serving humanity via its Flower Essence RIGHT NOW. After phoning Ben for inservice #174689, I can give you this link to our description of this beloved Flower Essence: Coralita

But the link is not enough!

St John’s strange off rhythm weather didn’t impede this Flower from speaking to me loud and clear about its mission- It told me numerous times during my short stay on the island that it was a particular blessing to humanity RIGHT NOW. And today Coralita asked me again if it could call attention to her gifts and her desire to serve, RIGHT NOW!

As a profound untangler of confused energies, Coralita has helped so many to unravel knotty problems and smooth out energy tangles in many places including the central nervous system. If you find yourself in a tangle physically, mentally, spiritually or emotionally, please consider Coralita.

Not surprisingly given its gorgeous pink color, it offers its support with a light touch but it is also a determined ally.

Dear dear Coralita. Such a love but also such a powerhouse!

I hope like the honeybees in the photos you will take her up on her offers of support!

Coming from a climate extreme in its seasonal temperature changes, I find tropical and subtropical places fascinating.

What would it be like to be able to grow fruits and vegetables all year round, not just in the brief growing season we have here in northern New England? The notion of citrus, avocados, mangos, bananas and other tropical fruits right in one’s own backyard amazes me.

Which is why I am always so puzzled that when I travel around St John, it appears that very few people bother to plant any of these trees for their own benefit, and when I pester people with questions about these plants, few seem to know or care about them. Things grow so very fast in a tropical environment like St John. One could have fruit bearing citrus trees in just a couple years and vegetables could be there for the harvesting year round, yet on St Thomas and St John I saw only one vegetable garden.

The one vegetable garden I found was at the Annaberg plantation ruins in the USVI National Park. During all my other trips to St. John, the demostration garden at Annaberg lay fallow, but this time a lovely man had brought back the fruit and vegetable patch and was growing soursop, passionfruit, bananas, sugar cane, papayas, and other traditional fruits and vegetables. He recognized me as a farmer, perhaps because I was embracing each plant like a long lost cousin, and happily took me on an extensive tour of his garden creation. Had luggage size and regulations allowed, I think the dear man would have loaded me up with cuttings from every plant in his creation.
During my trip, I heard tell of other gardens in the Caribbean, but not many. A magazine article I read on the plane noted that the Caribbean now imports $3 billion in food each year, and inter-island trade restrictions further complicate the situation, making it likely that the mango in my St John smoothie was not arriving fresh from nearby St Lucia but was a frozen import from the US.

The article highlighted two chefs, one in Jamaica and one in the British Virgin Islands, who were trying to use only local organic produce at their resorts. Their tactics included stopping at every mango tree they could find to ask the owners if they could buy all its fruit as well as offering to pay people to plant vegetable gardens, promising to buy whatever they grew, no matter what it was. While I found the article interesting, it did not exactly seem like a green revolution, though that was the phrase bandied about in the article. There were, after all, only two determined chef profiled, both of whom described it as near impossible to do what they were trying to do: serve local foods grown by local people.

I am sorry, but that feels wrong to me.

My concern about a region that can grow its own food but doesn’t isn’t just about disappointment that others are not interested in plants the way I am. A community that grows its own food has a measure of security and self sufficiency that is lost when the growing of its food is given over to people far, far away. When jobs shift from growing food for local people to taking care of tourists, the situation grows exponentially worse.

The last time I was in the Virgin Islands, three years ago, there were seven cruise ships in St. Thomas’s Charlotte Amalie harbor during Christmas week. This year there was one. The economy of the region is completely dependent on the travel patterns of people living thousands of miles away, and those people can’t afford to travel as they could several years ago. An island with no food production and dependent on shipments of imported food and steady infusions of tourists for its very survival doesn’t feel grounded or secure to me. It feels like a place hoodwinked into taking care of the wrong things like hot showers for visitors that may or may not show up.

One night during our stay, the power went off on St John and St Thomas. A backup generator made dinner possible in the campground dining pavilion, but civility was in short supply among the campers. In a campground, I had expected people to be able to go with the flow a little better. We all had flashlights and they were feeding us. What was the big deal? I could only imagine how things were going down the way at Caneel Bay, the high end resort on the island.

On our way across St Thomas to the airport for our return trip home, we passed FEMA headquarters. Short term help is in place both for the occasional power outage and for hurricanes. But what happens if travel patterns change for good? If I was a person living on St John, I would be up at Annaberg learning all I could from that lovely gardening gentleman, and I would take his cuttings too and get my garden started. And back here at the farm, I am thinking about how to extend our growing season and how to grow more of our own food. It’s not just about security to me, but about something deeper. Somehow, growing more of our own food makes me feel more grounded in my own life and more grateful for all its particulars, even the extremes of temperature.

If you have read my posts for any time at all you have probably noticed that a big expedition for me is a trip to the Meriden Post Office. In fact, when our December holiday began, it had been three years since I had spent more than a night away from the farm, and frankly, I was overdue for a rest as those of you who received one of my goofed up orders will no doubt attest.

Since it is easiest to rip me away from my gardens when they are under two feet of snow, Jim took his extraction window of opportunity and whipped our clan off to the island of St John, USVI for a holiday camping extravaganza at Maho Bay.

Extravaganza was NOT the word that the women gathered at midnight in the campground’s communal bathroom would have used to describe their time at Maho. I imagine most of us women spent at least a few moments during the wee hours of the night wishing we had the anatomy of our menfolk, ie those guys back at the tents peeing off the tent platforms with the panache of pirates on the high seas. Meanwhile, for us women, Depends adult diapers drinking no liquids after 3 in the afternoon seemed like a more agreeable option than our 2 am strolls up the campground stairs and boardwalks to our shared toilets.

Adding insult to injury, some clueless man had left an obnoxious diatribe pointers about toilet paper use at the campground in which he suggested two squares of toilet paper were ample for all situations. Let’s just say that the spunky grandmas I ran into at the bathroom in the middle of the night would have known exactly what they were going to do with their allotment of two squares, and they were unanimously going to use it to silence that ECO-JACKASS it didn’t involve a toilet.

Ah camping!

Anyone who thinks of a trip to the post office as a break from routine is obviously someone who doesn’t get out much….. so calling myself an inexperienced traveller is an obvious understatement. To put it mildly, once I leave the farm and sometimes when I am still here I am a stranger in a strange world.

So while I have just complained about my midnight walks to the bathroom, I really have few complaints about our recent trip. Practically everything struck me as wildly exciting. With a smoothie machine on every street corner, I was still THRILLED with my tropical passion flower guava mango smoothie at the stand across from the Cruz Bay Post Office. It felt special, in part because I didn’t have to clean the blender afterwards but mostly because just standing outside in the bright sun while someone made me a tropical drink seemed so wildly improbably. Here at the farm, there are maybe two hours each summer when making a smoothie outside sounds like a good idea.

Did you catch my mention of a post office again? Apparently, post offices are my reference point in any new world. I guess you can take a woman with a mail order business away from her local post office but you can’t take the post office out of her. Is it any wonder my children worried about my mental health when I got excited about Cruz Bay’s zip code of 00830. Only I could find this low number fascinating, even mysterious.

My postal obsession went so far that I actually introduced myself to the ladies at the Cruz Bay Post Office and took their picture to show MY post mistresses. What can I say? I found it enchanting that the postal mistresses of Cruz Bay processed their holiday packages OUTSIDE under a lignum vitae tree!

Leaving Cruz Bay and up the windy dirt roads to the campground, we settled into our tents overlooking the blue green waters of Big Maho Bay. There was something blissful about Swiss Family Robinson housekeeping. A few pieces of already soggy clothing took up a small shelf, no possessions beyond a few seashells littered the place, and there was only a bit of sand to consider sweeping out of the tent (In an act of compassion, I left the sand be).

During our first trips to Maho, back when I was a confused young mother who didn’t understand that any vacation was supposed to include me, I cooked for us in our tent. This time, we ate in the dining pavilion with other campers and during picnic lunches I didn’t even cut the sandwiches in half for anyone or even notice if the rest of the crew ate anything or stayed hydrated. This made life sooooooooo sweet. No cooking. No back seat cooking. No dishes, 76% 89% 97% of which I had no role in creating. No frantic scrambling at 5:50 each night to figure out what to cook for dinner. My mind could be a complete blank when it came to meal planning and just about everything else. This left so much delightful time to make new friends- Leeanne, Dave and Maya! We are so glad we met you!

And speaking of friends, it was also a joy to visit beloved old tropical Flowers friends again. This year, because of an unusual amount of rain, there were also many new Flowers to meet for the first time. I hung off the back of the various open air taxis, luxuriating in every roadside weed while my children rolled their eyes and Jim looked alarmed. On one expedition to the other side of the island, I asked our friend Hamilton to stop his open air taxi at the Love City Mini Mart in Coral Bay. While he assumed it was so I could join the throng inside to stock up on rum, it was really because I wanted to visit some Flowers I had seen last trip in fields surrounding the place. This time, I was in for a treat as the muddy goat filled parking lot of the Love City Mini Mart was encircled in candelabras of yellow Flowers, Cassia alata also known as Christmas Candles.

Because the seas were rough and the skies overcast from all the storms in the north, the water was too murky for much snorkeling but it was lovely for body surfing, and we stayed in the water riding waves until our fingers and feet were numb or in Jim’s case, until a rib was cracked.

The cooler conditions also meant we spent less time doing skin cancer research lounging at the beach and more time hiking. This was a whole new twist since in past trips the only hike I had taken was the midnight one to the communal bathroom. This time we walked to some wonderful places. One trail took us to a copse of bay rum tree whose crushed leaves filled the air with a wonderful bay rum scent. This is the kind of obvious remark that worries my children. Apparently only I get excited when a tree smells like it should.

And because St John is nothing if not dramatically hilly, most every hike delivered one glorious vista after another. Even after many trips to this island, I am always surprised by the way the British Virgin Islands and the US islands sit dramatically cheek by jowl in a sparkling sea. Let’s face it, sometimes the obvious is just so darn amazing.

One day saw me and Jim hitchhiking across the island on a mission to get to a place we couldn’t walk to. I hadn’t hitchhiked in thirty years but on St John it is practically di rigeur. And so I found myself feeling young and bohemian again as I rode in the back of a truck, talking with a most lovely St Johnian, What fun to sail down a mountain road in a stranger’s pick-up with a beautiful soul stirring the pot of my understanding about life.

But all trips come to an end and after more no see’um bites than I could count and some very silly nights playing whist in our tent, it was time to head home with a dozen, three dozen forty six Flower Essences. I may be the only person who returns from the Caribbean with more potions than Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.

I will look forward to sharing all the Flower Essences collected in our island meanderings. But today, it’s time to help the crew catch up on back orders! Our post mistresses may not be waiting under a lignum vitae tree, but they ARE waiting for our packages and so are you!

This week we had our first serious snowstorm, which meant it was Thembi’s first time coming up our hill in slippery conditions. She and her car were spared a journey into a ditch, but her car did end up stuck in the middle of the road. After I backed Thembi’s car down the hill while the town plow guy watched, I hustled Thembi up the hill to the farm where there were five mother hens from 19 to 69 ready to give her guidance about winter driving in the north country.

It may have felt more like an assault than a friendly conversation, because when it comes to this hill in winter and winter driving in general, everyone has a story (or ten) and way too many theories, tips, techniques and complicated advice.

Some morsels shared:

When driving anywhere, we told her she needed to dress for an assault on Mt Everest in case, as with today, she had to abandon her car and walk in the bitter cold. This was hard for Thembi, a fashionable woman from the city of Harare to hear …….but worse advice was to come. We broke it to her that her cute hot pink boots were not going to cut it. The most she could hope for was a flash of fake fur on the right kind of boots, ones that were going to weigh about thirty pounds each.

We suggested she go slow and then slow down some more. Then go half as slow again. Then put on the brakes.

We mentioned that she would need to ignore the knuckleheads breathing down her neck because she was going “too slow”. They’d pass her in their impatience and be off the road in a jiffy.

Particular tips had to be given about our hill. Our hill is a territory unto itself. It has the steepest grade of any road in town. Think Alpe d’Huez with sass.

We explained to Thembi that any vehicle coming down our hill had the right of way, and that she should avoid being in the way somewhere on the hill anyways. Frankly, the hill is so steep that even when the road is well sanded and plowed, it’s a dicey proposition to get down the hill in any vehicle but a sled…….. and really, you don’t want to be a sitting target for some free sliding object. Not a many ton vehicle. Not even a sled.

We amended our advice on coming up the hill to include going down the hill as well. As we discussed our many adventures on the hill, this amendment became a no brainer: Don’t start down the hill if there is a vehicle coming up either. Just wait ’til you have the hill ALL TO YOURSELF and then hope it stays that way until you have safely navigated the whole thing. Everyone who navigates this hill could offer Thembi a sworn testimonial about the wisdom of waiting. It would include phrases like “out of control,” “wheels spinning,” “car with a life of its own,” “off the road in the deepest ditch of the whole hill,” and “vehicle suddenly facing the wrong direction.”

We also used props. “Yes, that enormous town plow that just passed, it tipped over on the hill two years ago during a snowstorm. Our hill really is THAT steep.”

As far as personal car hygiene went, we were adamant. A CD cover is NOT the same thing as an ice scraper.

Nor does a hot cup of coffee held close to the front window open enough of a dim little space of clear glass for safe driving. This method is no substitute for warming up the car, even though everyone I know has probably used the hot coffee technique. For our neighbor Malcolm, it was his signature winter move, used daily on his way to teach fifth grade.

Even this morning, I thought Jim was lingering over breakfast because the conversation was so scintillating, but then suddenly he said, “My windshield’s finally clear. I gotta go.”

Yep, in winter everyone around here is only half listening to anything that is being said. The rest of their brains are thinking about the hill, the snow, the ice, their windshields and the way these ingredients don’t always mix well.

Unlike ingredients for a cold drink where ice only makes things better.

Ah Thembi, welcome to winter where ice isn’t just for cold drinks!

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.