Refuge

Last night a friend said, “When I visit the farm it feels like a prayer.” Early this morning I walked through the raspberry patch and picked a pint of nature’s jewels. Each one a gift in the midst of so much uncertainty and suffering.

The farm season is changing. We are preparing to open for visitors. After laboring in the long hot days of summer, the fruits and vegetables, as well as the farmers, are breathing with more ease. The ripening is here, the bounty of nature. Vines are growing upwards heavy with heirloom tomatoes, others are sprawling across the open field landing here and there with juicy melons, while still others, the underground tubers of banana fingerling potatoes, wiggle in the soil.

The earth is alive and producing.

We will open for pick-you-own raspberries in week or so. All details will be posted on our website along with instructions for visiting to insure the safety of visitors and our farmers. Please check before you come. We will use our website opening page to let you know of daily changes.

The Ripening Begins!

The Ripening Begins!

Artists also offer sustenance. Old Frog Pond Farm artists have created new sculptures on the theme of Refuge and our annual outdoor exhibit, Around the Pond and Through the Woods, will be open Thursdays through Sundays, 11-4 pm, beginning on September 3.

Monk, Madeleine Lord, welded steel

Monk, Madeleine Lord, welded steel

We’ve also created a few shady groves along the trails where you can take refuge.

Rest.jpg

Twenty-six poets have written eloquent poems inspired by the farm on the theme of Refuge. We will not host a ‘live’ plein air poetry event this year: the event draws too many people. Instead, we are publishing an online journal and will host a zoom reading with the poets on Sunday, September 20 at 3 pm. Photographer, Brent Mathison is taking photos of the sites that inspired the poets and these will be pinned at the zoom event. More details will follow, but save the date!

Photo for Cattail Blues, Brent Mathison

Photo for Cattail Blues, Brent Mathison

Cattail Blues
—Didi Chadran

A cool, astringent wind interrupts
A late Spring heatwave, wafting the cattails,
Which sway, shimmer, sway again, resilient.

Graceful, they bend like blue notes picked, plaintive
On a hollow-bodied guitar. They tremolo and
Sustain in an ostinato whisper.

The call-and-response of Schlieren heat and
Tonic gusts croons of heartbreak and new love,
Release and reinvention, poetry

And commerce. The plants’ lot is to shelter,
Protect, and nourish the reeds’ seedlings and
Model resolve against wind, drought, and flood.

Wafting like fingers apoise on the strings
To bend to the future. It brings what it brings.

Our self-serve farm stand will continue to be open seven days a week through October. Kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, and other fall plants are going in the ground. Long-awaited, albeit brief rains, are finally falling and the earth is a little less parched. The weather beings hear our prayers!

Be well and come visit us!

Can you find the one small worm among all these organically grown tomatoes?

Can you find the one small worm among all these organically grown tomatoes?

Plein Air Poetry

Today is for poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm. This afternoon, twenty-four poets will gather and walk the trail around the pond and through the woods, along the orchard, to the meditation hut, with a stop at the rock turtle, and back to the dam. The poets will be reading the poems they began writing earlier in the year inspired by a visit to the farm.

We need poetry to mine the subtle, the tenuous, the painful, the ecstatic, and elegiac feelings of our humanness. We need poetry when we are tired, hurt, hassled, and missing connection to our own heart. “I come to the farm,/having very nearly forgotten myself,” begins Lucinda Bowen. “And here blooms a memory. . . my surprise at improbable sweetness.”

Early in the year, Susan Edwards Richmond, organizer of the event, and I, choose a theme. This year’s subject, Memoir, “invited the poets to dig deeper, to go beyond surfaces, and draw, sometimes unbidden, wells of feeling from the landscape,” wrote Richmond in her introduction to the chapbook of poems. 

Susan Edwards Richmond, Plein Air Reading, 2013

Susan Edwards Richmond, Plein Air Reading, 2013

Poets sign up to participate. Throughout the spring and early summer, they visit the farm and walk the paths. When they come upon a view, a place, a tree, or a sound that awakens their muse, they stop and write. They return home, work on their poems, sometimes visiting again. In mid-summer, they submit their poems to Richmond, editor of the chapbook. For some, Richmond responds with suggestions, working closely with the writer to enhance the poem; others’ work arrives fully fledged. Then Richmond orders the collection, giving shape not only to the book, but to the walking event. Our slow-moving herd of poetry appreciators can’t be running from the dam to the orchard to the bell; then flying to the meditation hut and back again — or the walk would take us far into the evening hours.

Sometimes it is one of the outdoor sculptures at the farm that moves the poet to words. For poet David Davis, the ringing of Paul Matisse’s Olympic Bell brought back memories of Nepal. “Forty years ago in Katmandu/I heard a monk ring a temple bell/That shook my chest and opened my ears.” Polly Brown begins her poem with, “A sculpted figure by the pond,/gathering sky in her round arms,/Is my mother—alive but so lightly tethered/to the place and condition of her body.” She, too, mentions the bell, “hauling on the hammer I sound the bell/in the woods,/ and they [her mother and father] fly to me.”

Some poets invite us to feel the plight of the greater world. Linda Fialkoff writes, “So many refugees/choked into one small boat/fueled by a damp, ragged/body long held hostage.” It is as if she knew that Alicia Dwyer’s Suspended Encampment, a hanging sculpture behind the Medicine Wheel, would be arriving for the sculpture exhibit. Dwyer’s sculpture not only refers to the plight of Monarch butterflies, but to the migrations of people, the refugees throughout Europe, and now, the homeless millions in the aftermath of the recent violent storms and earthquakes.

Suspended Encampment, Alicia Dwyer (partial)     Photo:Robert Hesse

Suspended Encampment, Alicia Dwyer (partial)     Photo:Robert Hesse

bg Thurston picks up a stone and hears, “Sometimes sorrow/sits like a stone in your heart/and you are unable to lift it.” For Heather Connelly Bryant, the raspberry patch evokes a strong memory, “Yet I was wrong—now there is new life, new love, new/hope— infidelity no longer hangs in the air, everywhere.” Richmond, also wrote near the raspberries, “each of us now with our own green past, red stained fingers. Only rarely/was there enough/but we were always sated.” 

Richmond and her husband brought their children to pick raspberries at this farm years before I moved in, and she was so happy when she learned that I would continue to care for the patch and open it for public picking. Since that time, Richmond and I have collaborated on many projects — Wild Apples, a journal of nature, art, and inquiry, five years of Plein Air Poetry at the farm, and our most recent collaboration, a children’s book, Where’s My Bonkers? about a girl, her mother, and an apple. It’s always about collaboration at the farm. We share, inspire, and co-create together.

Cover Art & Design:  Lynn Horsky

Cover Art & Design:  Lynn Horsky

We invite you to join us this afternoon, Sunday, September 17 at 2pm to walk and listen to the poets read their poems. I guarantee you will be sated.

If you can’t make the event, a limited number of chapbooks will be for sale at the farmstand and on the farm’s website. The walk is free and open to the public.