Thanks to a work party last Sunday, the backyard fence is up – just needs gates and a few finishing touches – but now we don’t need to worry about letting 80 out and her wandering around the neighborhood. We can let her out and go back to caring for baby when the time comes.

Other list entries are coming into focus and feeling critical but only on a personal level. I am supposed to have some new work in a show at the end of this month. The only problem is that I have not yet created that work. But the fliers are printed and my name is sitting right there. Time to figure it out…

We knew we were pregnant while still living at circle acres but kept it to ourselves as the animosity boiled and the search for a new home commenced. We found a much-too-big house, but the size of the lot was too much to pass up. We are still getting used to the house, to the hot showers, to the kitchen with its awesome 1950s General Electric double oven. We seem to plan the garden area endlessly with the realization that we really do not have anything holding us back or pushing us forward. We can move at a pace that suits our days, our nights, our dinner bells.

The garlic bed went in late. We planted a much smaller bed this year as we are still trying to eat through last year’s pile. After giving a bunch away as seed and for eating, we are still loaded down with it.

We put in our first trees – a couple of fig trees started as cuttings a few years ago and a dwarf apple given to us by Kate and Keith from Bountiful Backyards.

Bountiful Backyards are starting an urban farm in East Durham. They have a Kickstarter campaign going at the moment to raise the cash necessary to make the farm a reality.

So that is where 2012 drops us off – new place, new friends, baby on the way. I hope you all stick around because this already branched blog is about to do some more branching. Keep an eye out for Quitter #7, new photo projects and my first real documentary films!

Now, freshened from rest and with plenty of built up demand to participate, the plan is to complete four mobs in two months with two of the mobs organized as “mini-mobs” with several nearby locations getting mobbed simultaneously.

In August we returned to Spence’s Farm to do some of the tasks that we do best – pull weeds, make large piles of compost disappear and lay down mulch.

This past Sunday we split up to hit three location in Durham. The Interfaith Food Shuttle’s urban farm plus the home gardens of several long time mob participants.

Kristin and I attended the mob at Steph and Steven’s house, turning a lot full of English ivy and wire-grass into several nicely cleaned up and mulched garden areas.

I am excited to see many, many first time crop mob participants. Ever expanding and pushing the model forward, I am still in awe at how it all continues to come together and function so well.

furniture has no say in life
it was made to be used by people
how many times have you felt like a bookcase
sitting in a living room gathering dust
full of thoughts already written?

Fugazi, “Furniture“

I know that I am not meant to dwell, hoping that the memories are malleable to a point of bittersweet returns. There is no nostalgia for a lost sense of direction, no yearning for a hungry presence among deeply broken individuals. I am intuitive enough to understand a person’s trajectory towards the bottom, introspective enough to see ruins standing tall on the backs of my retinas. I have participated fully in this setback, probably put myself out there too far, now getting ready to do it again in new circumstances with new people within new geography.

I have learned that there is really no other way to go about it – embracing this life of layers we breathe like so much old skin – than just getting right the fuck on with things, albeit with a bit more resilience, learning how to fill out an outline like it is second grade all over again.

Voting continues through July 1st. You only have to confirm your email vote once. After that you can vote daily, which would be awesome!

This image is one that I shot at an early Crop Mob at Okfuskee Farm in Silk Hope, NC.

I am the first to admit that I am sometimes very cranky to deal with especially if I get woken up. A few weeks ago, Brother was analyzing his bowling ball fetish at 11:30 at night. The backstory is that Gray found a blue bowling ball in the dumpster, brought it home and gave it a roll across the grass. Brother immediately took a fancy to it and began making a very strange sort of noise that no one had heard him make before. The strange thing is that he does not make the noise with any other type of ball or stick or animal. Only the bowling ball provokes this response.

So back to a few weeks ago. The sound of Brother’s yipping echoed through the trees, through the grass and through the tarp that covers the area behind my pillow. I calmly put on my head lamp and rubber boots, walked down the path and past the trampoline where Gray and Adah were giggling, found Brother’s glowing eyes and squeals of joy, took his bowling ball from him, threw it into a ditch full of water and quietly went back to bed.

Now the bowling ball lives in the ditch full of water, waiting for the summer drought. Brother also awaits the return of the romance.

So yeah, Quitter #6 is ready to go. As usual, the cost is $2 or whatever. An additional 80 cents covers the postage and PayPal fees. Here is a taste -

I distinctly remember second grade. It was somewhat of a turning point in my life, as much of a turning point as you can get when half your life is measured in years instead of decades.  That year I got my first and only pair of cowboy boots, a sharp toed brown and gold stitched outfit with heels and zero traction.  That year I also shoplifted a candy bar from a nearby gas station, smoked my first few puffs of a cigarette and, most importantly, got into my first real fist fight with someone who wasn’t my brother.

“Pepper King” John roasts peppers while kids get into trouble -

Katy washed the apple press before making cider -

A photo of a photo of a courthouse on fire -

This first shot (from early January) will be part of the “Sense of Place” exhibition at 18 Reasons in SF. If I had to describe why I chose to submit this one, I’m not sure that I could. There was a break in the construction of our scrap wood greenhouse, and it was starting to get late in the afternoon. Gray was taking a break.

Another one of Gray, this time using a skateboard deck for some fun time in the snow -

Warmer weather and a candid shot from Hannah and Link’s wedding -

Stevie processing a deer -

Slim pickings at the blueberry patch -

This is all a bit of good and a bit of bad, with it mostly being pretty exciting.  The bad is that our infrastructure is lacking in some key areas, mainly water access and possibly heated living space. For the most part, the people coming out are pretty resilient and not too terribly bothered by much. Which is good, because an upcoming house project will need resilient folks…

Things change, ideas evolve out of or into one person’s control.  To stay static is to admit defeat in some ways, to admit that you or we are no longer capable of dealing with the dynamics of just about anything.

We live with the rules, consequences and laws of thermodynamics, of gravity, of genetic drift, of economic quality.  We come as prepared as we can, but it is often not enough.  Gravity is unbeatable but yeah, we adapt and upgrade and try to keep our faces from hitting the dirt with too much force.

Two years into my return to a rural lifestyle, and I feel that we are gaining some traction on some sort of identity. We are on the edge of an era in which we build the place that makes the most sense to us, to the people who live at Circle Acres full time, for the transients who might like to someday live there full time, for the folks just stopping by for a week or so.  What do we mean to each other? How can our differences be energizing instead of polarizing? What models of community labor make sense for sustainability? Someday we might figure it out. Until then we’ll keep polishing the edges and looking for a nice spot in the grass.

Goals were set, reached, reset and reached again. The whole process has been inspiring other folks to go the route of Kickstarting their projects.

While you are out there backing my project (hopefully), please consider backing a few others -

I am still moving through photographs for the show, trying to figure out sizing. It looks like there will be six at 24×30. I thought it might be eight, but finding two more has been a challenge. In the 16×24 and 16×20 sizes I feel that there are some strong themes developing. I’m just moving on from there.

On the food and drink fronts, on Friday night we harvested sassafras from our land for use in the root beer. On Saturday morning I helped out with a sorghum harvest just down the road at Okfuskee Farm. I am hoping that the sorghum molasses will be ready in time to add the sweetness to the root beer.

There are ten days to go with the Kickstarter page and then seven more days to the actual show. Please continue to spread the word and add your backing!

Update #1 – Response to this project has been strong right from the start, and I hope that momentum continues to build. If you are considering contributing please be aware that the $600 goal is just the minimum. Funding can go well beyond that – it means more prints on the wall at the show, more support of local farms and more invested interest from you all in seeing this project become a success. It also means the ability to take the show to other locations, which would be amazing!

Update #2 – call for 200% It only took five days to reach 100% funding on my project – I am extremely happy that that has happened. Feels like the support is just getting started and the word is spreading.

With that said, let’s keep it going. Another $600 is another full wall of photographs at the show, 24 more feet of my work on display. That would be immensely incredible as well as immensely humbling, the support of friends and strangers coming together to help me achieve something so rewarding.

As I post this, the project is just shy of the 200% funding goal with 21 days to go. If we make it to 200% by tomorrow I have some crazy ideas for what can come with 300% funding and beyond.

For full disclosure, I will post what this money will go towards. The quick summary is printing, mounting, hanging hardware, postage, promotional materials (postcards and flyers), food and beverages.

Please consider funding this project!

It is busy here. Transplanting is brisk; up-potting is tight. The turkey poults arrived in the mail yesterday and are chirping under the red light of the cardboard box brooder. Radishes are ready for market as are transplants and eggs. Our CSA starts on Tuesday.

With added plant and animal life at Circle Acres comes added stress.  Some of the things I worry about are late frosts, hail storms and loss of power to the brooder lights. None of these things come under my control.  My livelihood is not exactly on the line, but the livelihoods of my pack certainly are. So I worry about pests and plant diseases and stray dogs.  If we could fast forward to a time in the future where we are just living and working at Circle Acres, taking care of our community and ourselves, I wonder if I will dwell on these same worries as much.

Living that ascetic life is never far from my mind.  I live among a pack that yearns for that life and lifestyle.  Yearn might not even be strong enough.  Ever reach for something so much that you come into a sickness for it, that unattainable abstract that you wish you could have but get physically and mentally pummeled for moving towards it? If I could think of a word for that then I would like to use it.

For an easy life it sure is hard to get there.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Crop Mob was about to move a big piece of dirt.

That dirt was me.

One of the reasons Kristin and I moved out of the city was because we felt that we had exhausted what we could do in Wilmington. The city was and probably still is unreceptive to the kinds of things we were tying to do. Most of what we started got some traction early on, but once we set them out on their own, folks quickly lost interest and things folded.  We became babysitters when what we wanted to be were peers – peers empowering other people to step up and get things done.

Worst of all was becoming a disappointed babysitter, cleaning up the messes of people who knew better but continued to act as if anarchism meant you never had to be responsible.

So yeah, Crop Mob came and got me and shook the Wilmington right out of me.  I simply had to tag along, give it all that I knew how to do and watch as other strong people filled in the holes, making the project a fluid and replicable and respectable entity.

And with the strong people comes the strong growth and with that comes the growing pains and the discussions about how best to proceed with this entity that we have created.  For better or worse, all the media attention will fade.  When that happens, some of the sexy will wash off and we will be left with a few fronts to engage.

1 – The original work area of the original Crop Mob group.  Do we split into individual county groups or do we continue to function as we have as a three county group?  My take has always been that we stay together as a three county group.  The camaraderie of engaging with my peers from Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Pittsboro is enough to make me hold out and not want to dissolve into smaller groupings.  Crop Mob events are some of the only times I get to interact with this larger agrarian culture, and I feel like the benefit to the group of this mixing outweighs the slight possibility of the group becoming watered down with long distance commuters.

2 – The rapidly expanding Crop Mob universe.  We are looking at facilitating the creation of at least 20 new Crop Mob groups in the US.  As these groups get established, more will follow from their examples.  How do we best maintain the core principles of the idea and replicate it without micromanaging every aspect of each groups’ formation? Again, for better or worse, we have to let the idea evolve on its own and accept that sometimes it won’t work out in the ways we might want or expect. We have to trust that we, by our own boots-in-the-dirt examples, have created an idea that needs minimal governance and minimal tweaking in order to accomplish work and build a community.

Gray seeds out some flats

Scalding a chicken before plucking

Filming a music video with anarchists

Madeline framed with a fence under construction

Jack

I thought it would be fun to look through the photographs I took during the last year, the ones that weren’t posted here on Cricket Bread as part of an essay.  These photos don’t necessarily tell a story all together. That said, there is no particular order in time or in theme.

Noel focuses on starting a fire with primitive tools

Mike Slaton prepares for Diner Night

Jamie hula hoops at the Pittsboro Pepper Festival

Kristin relaxes in Denver

Dance party in Pittsboro, North Carolina

Kristin destroys a door frame

Danielle, Noel and Gray cook dinner in the Wolf Den

I knew that the stories of how that big buck came to be dead would be floating around the house until they could be recited, with all the groan inducing embellishments, by people in the house who were trying hard not to listen.  I could probably dig deep enough to remember one or two of those stories, but who gives a shit really?

My grandfather also told stories, the ones that I have forgotten, the ones about how the deer tricked him or showed him up or maybe never even existed.  He never seemed to be about the perceived glory of shooting something in the face; when a deer was in the freezer before December he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that, with the deer’s help, he and his family would have food for the Winter.  He didn’t regale in the winners and losers of what most sane people would see as a wholly lopsided conflict heavily subsidized by civilization and its tools – a heavily armed human against an unprepared, unwilling and unaware opponent.

My grandfather’s task was brutal regardless, but maybe less so as there were no mounted heads on the walls of his home like there were in our home. The need for those stuffed and preserved reminders is something that I couldn’t explain back then, but know now is an indication of small mindedness, a dedication to the outward projection of dominance when you know that you are inescapably weak inside.  You are a collector with no sense of how to interact with the dead or the living, both phases of life simply reminders of inadequacy, weak interpersonal skills and low self esteem. If you have a deer head or a stuffed fish on your wall, go look at it and ask yourself what reminder it serves that could not otherwise be captured by a photograph or poem. Is it there to show your friends and family what a hero you are?

When I was younger, I volunteered twice to travel with a New York DEC deer ager on their rounds.  For fourteen hours we visited deer processing places as well as any house that had a deer hanging in the front yard.  My job was to write while the ager examined teeth and called out the ages of each dead deer.

I think it was during this time that I became permanently desensitized to the sights and smells of dead non-human animals.  At each processor were dozens of barrels and drums and tarps full of various parts; piles of legs next to buckets of guts and tails; lines of deer carcasses waiting to be disassembled by hacksaws, band saws and reciprocating saws, mostly frozen in rigor mortis or by the depth of cold in the evening air.  Steam escaped from some of the recent arrivals, a sign that they were less than an hour dead.

*****

There can be nothing more brutal or common or necessary than taking a life in order to eat and sustain a body. Non-human animals do it without question, without any perceptible remorse or hesitation. What makes our actions so much different?

We pull carrots from the soil, ending their run from gravity, ending their gathering of sugar and all the processes that made them a living thing. They may not scream or run or struggle much, but a carrot is a living thing nonetheless and we must kill it in order to eat it.

Eating a carrot is nothing like eating an animal, which is why many choose not to eat the latter at all. I respect that choice; it was a choice that I had once made as well. As with eating it, killing a carrot is nothing like killing an animal. Animals articulate their disappointment in our choice to kill them in blood gurgles, screams and the twitches of ending nerve impulses. We destroy them in order that we can live; we destroy them for other reasons as well, reasons that have no bearing on survival. If you do not believe that then you deny that your meal had any previous life beyond its packaging. I apologize, but I can’t let you do that.

Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads -

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.

Hardly recognize simple things anymore
I don’t want to be defeated

What else is there to do
But go outside and look around*

*Lyrics taken from Bed for the Scraping – Fugazi