Hemlock House

I stood on my porch, hanging my laundry out to dry. Off in the woods to my left, I could hear a fellow volunteer leading a tour:

"What do you guys think we might be growing here?"

"Alligators!" A little boy's excited voice shouted.

I imagine he was disappointed to learn that the correct answer is mushrooms. The tour moved off towards the gardens. Kids from last night's global gateway program were playing basketball in parking area and I could hear goats bleating in the south pasture. All of my five housemates were working or gone and the house was oddly quiet, other than my music.

There are a lot of us in the house, but so far, things work out pretty well. We listen to a lot of Iron and Wine, Dar Williams, and The Decemberists. We keep a list of our goals for the summer on the fridge: Learn to make yogurt, do yoga, make time to play guitar, learn to make amazing pizza, bring back the spork, practice tai chi, knit mittens, write a song about food that people will take seriously, chill out. We had a meeting and talked about making a chore chart and having some sort of system, but mostly we just do what needs to be done. We come home in the evenings worn out, but after showers and jostling elbows around the stove and fridge and table and eating dinner things start to pick up. On a tame night, we might put in a movie or play a game or wander off to read and write and play guitar. But more often hilarity ensues, and we end up making infomercials for sporks and playing madlibs to create a house horoscope. We hang out in the kitchen or on the porch and the living room is sadly neglected. We talk about what we did that day, things happening on the farm, food we want to cook, spirituality and religion, our families and lives. We plan theme dinners and write them on the calendar and then forget the dates. When volunteers from the other house come over, they say our house seems like a fun - and clean - place. We agree about the fun. The clean part comes and goes.

There are 23 full time volunteers here at the farm, the farm being Overlook Farm. It's part of Heifer International and serves as an education center, about Heifer's mission (to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth) and about sustainability and about other cultures. I'm an education volunteer: think a mixture of camp counselor, tour guide and outdoor ed facilitator and then throw in some sheep herding and goat milking and pig slopping to round things out. I've had two weeks of training but only one week of work, so I'll tell you more about that later.

For now, it's good to be done with college, not have classes and books looming up in the fall, to come home in the evening and not have to work on homework. To spend my days off baking black bean brownies and going hiking and making yogurt and working on my novel. To read Shakespeare just because I feel like it.