Uncollected Thoughts.

We've been working hard this week on the adobe - putting up chicken wire to hold the insulation, which is twenty years' sheared wool from Jon's old flock of two dozen sheep; mixing clay and sand into a paste and applying it to the chicken wire as a stucco; putting up a plastic awning to keep the rain out of the drying adobe.

Mario and I had dinner Wednesday night at Mandala Farm, a CSA operated by about half a dozen young folk down the street from here. They are one of the most radical, beautiful groups of people I have met; they work hard all day, all season to produce vegetables and meat and provisions to sell and to sustain themselves. At dinnertime, they light up and tell stories about the animals, and working in the garden, and such. A simple life indeed.

It just so happened that one of the girls from Mandala will be driving to Burlington next Thursday... so I've got a ride to see Bread and Puppet Theatre, which is a huge grassroots institution in Vermont that three people have insisted I see before I leave the state and the East Coast.