Day: July 19, 2013

The first Bedlam Farm art show was held in the restored Pig Barn behind the farmhouse, the most beautiful of our barns, I think, I always wanted to make it an office to write in. More than 2,000 people showed up over two days, and Maria assembled a group of artists who brought their works to the barn. The streams of people never stopped coming.

I did the animal circus, herding sheep with Rose, bringing people to meet Simon, who was new to the farm and had already become an Internet sensation, recovering from his awful neglect. Maria did the art, our usual good pairing.

It was a coming out as an artist for Maria, a chance to show her neat new fiber works, and it was a coming out for the two of us as a couple, and also for me, who had been holed up hiding from the world and writing books for several years. It was a great success, people flew in from all over the country to meet us, see the animals, see the farm, take a look at the place they’d been reading about.

Several years later, the world has changed, our world has changed. We are holding another Open House/Art Show, a coming out of a different kind on a different scale. Bedlam Farm is a big stage, it was built for beautiful and large things with its pastures, fences big barns and views, pastures and big open rooms. So many things about this art show are the same. Maria and I are planning this show together, and our roles will be the same. She is making great art – scarves, potholders, pillows, quilts – and selling it in a new studio barn (an old schoolhouse, really) and and I will be herding the sheep with a different dog, Red, and bringing visitors to meet Simon and the donkeys, usually the first time most of them have ever seen a donkey. I’ll be talking a bit about our move, explaining how Red works, doing my usual tub-thumping for donkey awareness. There will be some other artists showing their work as well, the poet Mary Kellogg will be reading some new poems, as she did at the first show.

I guess the big difference is that the scale of our lives has changed. We needed a smaller stage, we have one barn and a beautiful old farmhouse that could fit into the downstairs of Bedlam Farm. The farm is flat, the barn right behind the house, the mortgage closer to the new world of publishing. I know where I am. I know who I am. We are close to a busy road, near a vibrant and lovely small old upstate New York farming down, now becoming an arts center stuffed with artists, singers, writers. Farmers too.

Our lives needed to shrink. We were ready to join this community, they were ready for us. I am teaching writing workshops, the art of the blog, volunteering as Recommender-In-Chief at my local bookstore, taking Tai Chi lessons.  My creative stage has grown larger, not smaller. The era of the big books ended and publishing changed, but story-telling and image-making is thriving and my work turned in a number of new and different directions – this blog, e-books, photography, podcasts, social media, and yes, paper books too. Surprisingly for me, I am more creative now than ever, and I see the same is true of Maria.  She is making different things, they look different, she is blending writing with her fiber art, she is growing up and out in her work, her blog has brought her imagination and great talent to the wider world.  People keep telling me they are sad we left Bedlam Farm, but I am not sad, it was wonderful then, this wonderful now.

We are thriving here.

It was time. I entered my sixties a few years ago, some of the hills had become harder for me to climb, my legs less steady, some of my falls on the ice and the paths harder to shrug off. My life with Maria is smaller, more intimate, having a partner to share your life is transforming, nothing is really the same. We love our farm, it is the right place for us now and we are happy to be sharing our bounty again, the same sort of thing, really yet the scale of life is what different, smaller, more peaceful.

As before, we are excited about this open house, this art show. We don’t really know what to expect – 2,000 people or 200 – but it doesn’t really matter. We have found our scale, come to our place. We know where we are in the world, in life, and this is the right place. So happy to let the world in. It feels very right to show this world to the people who make it possible.

The tale of the two art shows is a story about the scale of life, and how it changes, and of how one couple changed with it. No one can hide from the scale of life, the great challenge and opportunity is to embrace it.

The Bedlam Farm Open Houses are fun, a mix of things – a bit literary, some readings, poetry, a bit dog, sheepherding, Love Dog, a bit farm, donkeys and chickens, and some art from the fertile workings of the Schoolhouse Studio. Mostly, we will have fun for four hours. There is no charge for coming, we are not seeking donations (we will have a jar for the Hubbard Hall Scholarship Fund somewhere), help some kids who need help take some art and dance and other creative classes) or accepting any. There will be art for sale, details on Maria’s website. Potholders, pillows, pincushions, collages, one photo from me, some notecards, a quilt.

We plan on four sheepherding demos if we can get them all in (don’t want to wear out Red or the sheep), continuous group visits to Simon, Lulu and Fanny, a reading or two. We can’t offer toilet facilities or food, but plenty of both nearby. We have Jack Macmillan on hand to help with parking and keep things moving and help out. Please don’t chase or touch the chickens or let your kids chase or touch the chickens. Please don’t throw balls or sticks for Lenore, she’ll have plenty of excitement and will need her energy. Please don’t bring your dogs or other pets. You can bring carrots or apples for the donkeys. Please don’t enter the pasture without being accompanied by me or Jack. We can’t open up the farmhouse, Maria will be holding forth in her studio barn, her colleague Kim Macmillian will be assembling some vintage hanky scarves in the studio during the afternoon.

The six above are on sale for $45 plus shipping during the Open House. If any are left, Maria will put them up for sale online next week. I have one $150 signed photo on sale, Queen Flo and the hens, that’s all. No copies or multiple orders, I’m just going to do one every now and then, one only. It will be on display in the Schoolhouse Studio Barn.

If anybody wants books for me to sign, bring them from home or stop at Battenkill Books on Main Street in Cambridge and pick some up and bring them to the Open  House, I’ll be happy to sign them. Frieda will be inside during most of the afternoon (nobody will get inside) and I will bring her out for some walks. Please don’t pet her. She doesn’t bite but doesn’t care to be touched. Please come, take as many photos as you wish, other details here.

We thought I ought to have a photo for sale at the Open House, something for Maria to put in her Studio Barn so we agreed on this one, a titled and signed 16 X 20 photograph on archival paper with 8 ply matter. It is larger than the previous photo, and has all the chickens in it. Flo the retired barn cat is regally ensconced on her rocking chair, her lady-in-waiting hens arrayed around her. This photo definitely captures the spirit of resourceful Flo, the regal hens and our Appalachian back porch, one of the most beloved porches on the Internet.  I’ve been doodling around for years about how to sell photos that I love occasionally, and it has belatedly occurred to me to just charge what they are worth. A novel idea.

Since the other photo was purchased by someone online, we feel this one ought to be held for people coming to the Open House on Sunday. If it is not sold then, it will be offered online next week. This could be fun.

The swimming hole has been a fixture of rural life for many years in America, and it has changed from Mark Twain’s time to this – there were swimming holes all over the place in “Huckleberry Finn.” Our lives have changed, our country has changed, and this kind of access, informality and community has become rare in tense, lawyer-driven, liability-obsessed America. We go, like many local people, to Pooks, a swimming hole maintained by a farmer of that name for the benefit of his neighbors and fellow townspeople.

Pook keeps a path open for cars, we park right next to his cornfields, if you didn’t know where it was, you would sail right past it.

Like everything else, going to swim has become complex in the Corporate Nation.  Corporations don’t give things away for free, they charge for everything, their lawyers tremble at the thought of unsupervised people having fun with signing documents and releases.

Many beaches and lakes are polluted, crowded, or charge for access, many more have been closed off to all but the rich people who live on them, there are all sorts of regulations relating to safety, conduct and health. Thousands of people sit on towels and umbrellas right next to one another, few of them know each other. Paid workers take care of the beaches, maintain them, and there are often traffic jams, disorderly people and other problems involved in going to the shore.

Rural life is very different, Pooks Swimming Hole is very different, it is closer to Huck Finn than to modern, fearful and intense America. There are no lifeguards there, there is a small area for parking. Neighbors and local residents keep a sharp eye out for litterers or people who are too loud or sloppy. It is quiet there, in rural life the quiet is respected. We all make sure it is clean and well maintained so that Pook will keep it open, he could shut it in a heartbeat if he wished. We often talk to each other, grumble about town taxes, share the secrets of the Battenkill River, talk about the town, lament the outlanders who come onto the river, yell and scream from their tires and rafts and toss butts and beer cans and garbage in the river.

We watch out for each other. When we were there last, a dog got caught in a current and was struggling and everybody at Pook’s was in the water in a flash. Everybody keeps an eye on children, dogs mingle freely, take a swim with strangers. People bring lawn chairs and sit and yak, meet neighbors, notice who is missing from last year. This is not something that can be done on Facebook, that costs any money, you just bring a chair and a towel and plunge in. There is a great deal of trust and community involved, and trust and community still thrive in rural life, even though the politicians have abandoned rural areas as inefficient, they don’t have a lot of votes, and are not considered central to the global economy, are not a source of cash for the investment bankers who run the world.

Here, we don’t need to get up at dawn to beat the traffic, or pack big lunches to get us through the day, or pay big fees to park. The swimming holes are in our back yard. We talk about them sometimes, we never say where they are. Swimming holes are a secret, protected from the lawyers, regulators and hordes of the outside world. Our secret. On a hot day, we start thinking of Pook’s in the mid-afternoon. We will see our neighbors and friends there. It will take several minutes to get there.

Rural Americans once dominated the country, shaped it’s laws, sparked it’s Great Revolution, fed it’s citizens. Now, rural Americans are in a minority, drowned out by their richer and louder citizens along the coasts. So much has been lost here, the jobs are gone, the Churches struggling, post offices reducing their hours,  libraries and schools on the margins, but so much remains. I love our swimming hole, I hope Pook’s generous farmer’s heart beats forever and that we fly under the radar of the lawyers and regulators and big city crowds desperate for places to go.