A year is not a long time. Not anymore. I concede that for Terah, the span of time between one birthday or Christmas and the next may seem to stretch out before her like a highway trodden by foot, and I remember that feeling, but it's long gone for me (Jason authoring this).
Contributing to the sense I have that I JUST DID that thing, such as the biochar burn we do every solstice, or the hog butchering we do every early December, is the fact that this land-connected life we have entered and co-created sometimes feels like a series of interconnected annual rituals. And now that we've had the same basic components in place for several years, it all starts to run together, messing with my sense of time.
But things grow. Things like kids. And trees. So the passage of time doesn't go by wholly unmarked.2023: in some ways it was the year between the years. Except for the deep drought conditions we endured this summer and fall, in many of the obvious ways it was less remarkable than the years we've just come through and the years we anticipate. The COVID scene sort of coasted: we're still among the few wearing masks in crowds and asking our potential social contacts about symptoms and exposures. A new variant happened, and we decided to stay away from Pennsylvania Christmas celebrations once again as numbers began to soar seasonally. The new normal, maybe? It's an uneasy pattern, but it's not much changed from last year. We mostly, this year, kept our home and work systems going, and kept our eyes open for ways to simplify, improve, and refine them.
This has been welcome, really. We needed something more like an ordinary year. We were still too busy in the middle of the year, but my contracting work and Janelle's doula work fitted perhaps a bit more comfortably around the farm work, when you look at the year as a whole (we even took a vacation in August!). The growth and change...the news!...can perhaps be said for 2023 to be more in the details. And many of the details pertain to the people involved, so let's get straight to the updates on each of us:
Terah (8):
Terah's spunk has not abated one jot! However, some new awarenesses and skills have come along. For example, her reading has improved (she's a slow and steady reading learner, not an epiphany type). Also, she now usually keeps her undies on when she gets hot tearing around the house, and asks if anyone is due to come over before taking off her pants. :) She's now able to carry a tune, and can hardly stop herself from joining in if someone starts a song on piano or by voice that she is familiar with. She'll proudly demonstrate her newfound ability to play "Silent Night" on piano with chords! She enjoys her daily excursions with Alida into the farmyard to do her chicken chores and join Alida in pampering the chickens with treats, even if it can be hard to make the transition out (and back in!) sometimes. 
She continues to be more the physical daredevil, and is our best splinter remover. She does her best to keep up with her sisters at yard soccer, and is getting pretty good, truth be known. She was a strong, steady asset to her city league teams, especially this fall. She likes drawing and puzzles and craft projects with Grandma. She loves perhaps only two things more than a good wrestle: a big present and a warm snuggle. She adores hanging out with close friends, declaring on our November getaway that she wanted us to increase the frequency of those special times until they filled the whole year! But large crowds of kids overwhelm her, and people who lavish certain kinds of intense attention on their surroundings make her feel, in her words, "tired." I feel ya, kid! She also gets quickly overwhelmed by scary movies. Ok, by almost every single movie out there, more realistically. She loves growing and selecting her popcorn, and likes to have a few flowers of her own in the ground. 
Computer games and nature documentaries are big faves. She especially likes anything narrated by David Attenborough. I was amused to overhear one day that in a nature film depicting a lion pride predating on their fellow occupants of the savannah, she was rooting for the lions! It turned out that her tender heart couldn't stand the thought of the cubs not having anything to eat. Speaking of things to eat, Terah is learning to cook, frequently frying her own breakfast eggs and toasting her own bread (when she's not slipping upstairs for a bowl of Cheerios...still a yum!), she is getting pretty good at inventing tasty cracker recipes, and she is signed up for cooking for the family once per week! In contrast to her older sisters, Terah often enjoys washing the dishes (and she's...kinda fast!). Terah loves her life, and I can't imagine her picking a favorite part of it, unless that would be helping her mommy babysit!
Alida (12):
Alida gets mistaken for a high schooler a lot these days, and once she was even asked if she was from a local college! She's fully into adult shoe and clothing sizes, and is about to catch Kali on height. Where she'll stop, nobody knows! But we err if we forget that she's still a kid: she still needs a good snuggle pretty often (don't we all, really?), and very much values help and guidance as she picks up many of the skills her adult self is going to need. Alida loves to develop and hone physical skills: shooting baskets or soccer goals, punting waaay down the field (seriously...that girl has a FOOT), frisbee, fling sock, and all manner of invented fiddly games around the house. Alida is athletic and good at sports generally, but reluctant to enter a competitive league for fear that game day pressure--to which she is sensitive--would take all the fun out of it. She's got a point, right? Her quick hands and knack for seeing order in chaos make her a great jigsaw puzzler, and a fierce Dutch Blitz competitor (abandon hope, all ye who enter there). 
She's getting into the next level of reading and literature appreciation, recently getting the full benefit of a solo read through James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small. Her appreciation for literature is now extending also to Shakespeare, as she and Kali are traveling together to Staunton a lot these days, where they are volunteer ushers at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Playhouse. Alida takes high satisfaction in knowing the route intimately, as well as all the other logistical particulars involved, including making sure she's dressed properly (She still pays a lot of attention to how she clothes and adorns herself). She loves showering attention on anything cute in her environment, from stuffed animals to piglets, to babies, to her treasured flock of Cub Run Crele chickens, from which she loves to find the tamest and train them to enjoy human contact. She likes helping me select the breeders from our flocks, enduring cold and long hours to stick with it until the end on leg banding day. She still selects her popcorn, too. 
She is becoming a great bread baker and a good cook in general, even if cleanup time isn't her favorite part. She savors opportunities to sample new foods, or try new recipes, invented or found. Alida is in that sweet in-between time of childhood, when a person can engage in imaginative play with younger children, or participate in adult conversation. She loves to go on errands or other galavants with Kali in the car. She was triumphant last night when, in the game of "Wrestle The Fluoride Tablet Away From Daddy If You Can," (a semi-regular bedtime ritual for the younger two), I genuinely COULD NOT prevent the two of them, working together, from uncurling my fingers. What can I say...she was sitting on my arm (elbow up, extended), and my face was smashed into the mattress! It's a milestone.Kali (20):
This kid is, of course, not much of a kid anymore. She embarked on her first college course (college composition) this year at Blue Ridge Community College. She's decided to take the second level of that same course with the same prof in the spring semester, as well as a computer course. It's worth mentioning that this was Kali's first official, matriculated, graded class ever. She enjoyed it!
Kali still enjoys cooking, getting better all the time at planning and executing a full meal, whether that's reheating leftovers or sniffing out some interesting recipe to try. We all benefit from her skill with spices! She's even getting a little quicker at washing up afterwards. She spends lots of time with her younger sisters, helping out with their homeschool pursuits, playing all sorts of games, and frequently getting generally tackled (Alida can now genuinely pin her) or otherwise delayed from her tasks. We don't know exactly what she does after everyone else is asleep, but sometimes she saves us collections of funny stuff she finds on the internet. As for how long she stays up...let's just say she has seen the lights turn on in the in-law quarters before she calls it a night.
2023 could be thought of as the year that Kali really stepped up her contribution game, which is to say it felt important to her to take responsibility for her part in home life, and she did. She's helped out with the repair follow-up roof maintenance project we had to do (THAT's another story), she cut and stacked and split the firewood for the year (with help from her sisters and me), and for much of the year she was our laundry person. Kali coached Terah's soccer team in both spring and fall seasons, and provided all the transportation for both Terah and Alida's soccer practices and any games the parents didn't come to. Kali still keeps up with the duck flock she's been tending for over ten years, and still maintains her own popcorn strain that she's been tending for almost as long. Yes, it is improving, and yes, it's delicious! The popcorn, I mean...not the duck flock.
Janelle (45):
Janelle's recovery from burnout continues apace, which is to say we are still figuring out, when fatigue or anxiety or energy loss show up, whether that's still her body saying it needs more space to heal, or whether she's bumping up against her energy limits ways that help us understand what capacities she can expect from herself in an ongoing way. Our life and her mind pushed her so far beyond her capacities for so long that we're still working on understanding her baseline. Recovery from eating and food pathologies continues also, with her experiencing tremendous relief and freedom compared to what she endured for most of her life, and we are so grateful! Body acceptance and ramping down the hype around food choices...it's a better, healthier way for her (us). On a not unrelated note, she's been enjoying baking bread again.
Janelle's doula work picked up in 2023, and she's found accompanying parents and babies in their family transitions to be very meaningful and enjoyable work. She's still working out how to keep from overcommitting (this may be a lifelong learning process in all areas of life for her), and how to avoid the trap of living up to (or better yet exceeding, just to make sure) perceived expectations. But she's getting there, and often comes back from a prospective parent meeting seeming energized, and inhabiting herself with joy. She had been saying for years, before leaving CJP, that she thought she'd like to be a doula, and it turns out she was right! The intensity of the birth experience, the ability to pour herself into another person's need for a period, and then the ability to withdraw and rest...this is an auspicious cycle for my wonderful partner who is uncommonly unable to do anything halfway.
2023 might be thought of as a full circle year for Janelle, in that she's spent more time than perhaps ever before hanging out with babies, which she has been magnetized to since her earliest childhood. Some of her doula families have sometimes come and visited even beyond the end of her official involvement, and two youngsters, Bear and Luca, each come regularly specifically for some time at Tangly Woods (while their parents get a few other things done.) She's not ready to start a daycare or anything, but she sure loves babies! And they love her back.Janelle spent more time in the garden in 2023 than ever. Her gardener's confidence is growing, and with having learned the magic of podcasts, she can move through long stretches of tedious work without panicking that she's not doing all of the other things that need to be done. Usually. She and the younger girls have signed up to be "Civic Scientists" with the Land Institute's "Perennial Atlas" project. For the next three years, they will monitor two plots (to be planted here in our home garden) of a mixture of annual crop plants and their perennial relatives, returning the data to the Land Institute to aid in their development of perennial crop plants.
As she flipped through the year's photos to insert a smattering here, she also marveled how (despite ongoing precautions around illnesses of various kinds) our home was graced with the presence of dearly loved ones from near and far (too many to name, but you know who you are!)! We savored so many times of sweet connection, shared meals, laughter, games, meaningful conversations, grief, celebration and much more. We also continue to feel grateful for the many ways we benefit practically, emotionally and relationally through intergenerational living. Jason (47):
Jason, Jason, Jason...what a guy! Still having trouble narrowing it down. But I was proud of myself when we went over our garden plan recently for 2024: I was able to let some stuff go without too much stress for me or those around me (Janelle).And let some stuff go I must, because we have set our sights pretty high for my year, in that we hope to plunge into a build we've been wanting for years: a screened pavilion. Triple-function family hangout space, semi-public gathering space, and farm/garden storage and processing space. I created an ambitious set of sketches, but we have to get some feedback from architect and engineer friends before finalizing a design that will be affordable enough but also functional enough. Between materials lists, re-design iterations, coordinating with a few subcontractors, organizing volunteer workdays, and just getting the actual tradeswork done, my plate is likely to be pretty full until this is all wrapped up.
Partially because when I'm not working on the pavilion, I will still have to keep up with the contracting business at least minimally, and if the grant I applied for in November from USDA's SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) comes through, I'll be collecting data on winter-ready peas and making study plots, setting up educational field days, etc.But I'm getting ahead of myself. 2023 saw the development of my business, as I was able to get a box trailer (thanks, Dad!) repaired and outfitted for carrying my trade tools. This has meant less of my time going to loading and unloading tools from the car, and less of my time and my clients' money wasted by my forgetful tendencies. This made the contracting business more joyful for me this year. It didn't hurt that I got to do several interesting jobs in the homes of friends. The business is intended to supplement the farm life, and 2023 proved that there is strong potential for that pattern. Some of the jobs fell at inconvenient farm moments, but other parts of the year felt much roomier than usual because I could arrange my contracting work around the busy times on the farm.
I also continue with the breeding work on vegetables, grains, and chickens. This year's drought made for a tough production gardening year, but a pretty good selection year for drought tolerance. A particularly exciting development in 2023 was the Tangly Woods growout of a mix of winter-ready hulless barley strains that came out of a collaborative research and development project centered at Oregon State University. Our friends at Wild Amaranth got hold of some of the seed and passed it on to sow here in 2022, and we got a nice seed increase from the portion of the planting that made it through the winter! This fall we were able to sow our usual barley patch all to the hulless mix as a result (and it's looking really good so far!). This new crop type matters because winter grains--occupying an underused growing window--are more drought tolerant and beneficial to the soil, because barley is productive and easy to grow, and because hulless grains can be threshed, processed, and cooked without any need for specialized equipment. For a climate- and collapse-resilient food system, I can't think of a better addition! I suspect my descendants will be adding the descendants of this barley by the fistful to their soups all winter long, and yours might be, too.This year I also grew out some seeds for an Indigenous friend, a seed keeper who has poor access to land these days and was worried about a few treasured varieties. I wasn't able to successfully increase all the seeds, but it was a good experience for both of us, and we hope to do more of it. The seed sanctuary I built last year was ideal for this job in many ways.
2023 marked, in some respects, a subtle but profound shift in my mindset away from "homesteading" and "self-sufficiency," and towards participation in a broader movement for food sovereignty and resilience for all of us. This has potential to relieve some strain in our home system as we hold the prospect of "growing our own food" more loosely, detaching our self-esteem score as home farmers from the inverse of our grocery bill, and reorienting to emphasize farm endeavors that, to paraphrase Parker Palmer, are where our greatest joy meets the world's deepest need.
Maybe that's enough for this year's letter. Peruse the rest of the blog for specifics about classes we took (coppice agroforestry), where we went on vacation (Michigan, Iowa, etc.), and what our summer plates of food looked like in the endless series of food photographs we seem unable to restrain ourselves from taking and publishing on the blog. Just because we're backing away from food as a moral whipping post doesn't mean we don't still love the stuff!
At the turn of this year, our hearts are full of gratitude for the four seasons of tender family life we've been so fortunate to enjoy again. At the same time, our hearts are frequently full of dread and fear and trauma on behalf of the many who don't have the full benefit of a safe and nurturing context, whether through the pain of psychosocial and family dysfunction, the relentlessness of racism and apartheid, the burden of economic and cultural domination, or the chaotic vortex of open violent conflict. In this interconnected world, it's never been more evident that there is no such thing as "us and them." There's just us. All of us, each of us. And each of us has the same need for light, comfort, joy, peace on earth, and the renewal that a new year can bring.Enjoy our first of the month photos with whoever comprised the Tangly Woods' crew on that day!
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
