April 30

SO. Once I’ve caught up from the winter of not writing, here’s a bit about life these days. I’m writing from Lady Killigrew, a lovely little café overlooking a waterfall next to the Bookmill “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”. I drove over this afternoon to let the piñata I’ve been constructing dry. I hung it on the clothesline outside the house in Wendell.


Wendell is a lovely little town (village, perhaps?) of 900. Nestled between “the valley” (the liberal, organic farmy Connecticut river valley, full of coffeeshops and college students) and “central mass”, the hilly, never never land between eastern and western mass, home more to dairy farms with a more almost Appalachian vibe. Wendell is still certainly in the valley, while north orange, where I work, isn’t. I’m renting from Theresa, the teacher at the chicken coop school, a one room school house for 7th and 8th graders at maggies farm. It’s lovely to live with someone who works there so we can talk and carpool…and is also someone I rarely see at work, so we certainly have our own lives. The house is a fascination – it was moved to Wendell from the quabbin and has a least two separate additions and wiring to match (apparently there are about 25 different phone jacks in the house). In the back, she has a bunch of small cold frams, covered with old windows, where we’ve planted kale and swiss chard and onions. She’s strung up a hammock from the back deck, where I like to drink coffee on a weekend morning, and it has a lovely little woodstove just off the kitchen, where I like to curl up and read in the weekday evenings.

We had our first all farm school softball game of the season yesterday and I’m happy to report my team (team Chives) was victorious!

Otherwise I’m in the midst of several books, as usual – The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond, Javatrekkers, by Dean (of Dean’s beans, a local coffee roaster) and what I just bought “how to fix damn near everything”, by franklynn Peterson.

Just before leaving western mass, I went to a couple of good craft visits with the caretaker apprentices and managed to get a good crew up to the lenox contra dance! I’m excited to join Theresa and some of my new neighbors at Greenfield, a legendary one.