Wow, 2026 has already chomped its way through almost two weeks of itself, and I haven't even started our 2025 review!
I have to start with the biggest event/change/loss from our family's year: Janelle's Mom died on May 6, after a short contest with what was probably originally pancreatic cancer. The tumor was well advanced before discovery in the first months of 2025. She died here at Tangly Woods, surrounded by all of us usual Tangly Woods residents, plus Karen and Sue. She spent most of her last day on the deck, facing the mountain, in perfect spring weather, with her pain well under control and in the comfort of the presence and touch of family.
Adjustment to the new reality doesn't quite say it right. It's more like a new starting point for family life; learning how to do life in a new configuration and with a collective skillset and mindset that include hers only in the form of imprints she made on each of ours and on the whole. In this way she is indelibly present in the midst of her deeply felt absence.That whole series of events and new realities definitely scuttled any attempts we might have otherwise made at constructing the long-desired screened pavilion we had hoped to erect in 2025. At this point that project remains indefinite in its timeframe, or, indeed, in our determination to complete it. Yes, it would be so beneficial to our home place and our life's ways, and--oh, my!--it's going to take some doing. Especially without Mom here to act in all the little and big, supportive ways she always did.
Furthermore, it's hard to decide what feels wise to get engaged in, financially and otherwise, when there is such pain, turmoil, anxiety, and uncertainty happening in our society's governmental, moral, and cultural landscape. Change is in the air, and it smells like fear. While human moral depravity is far from a new concept and nobody has the monopoly on it, cruelty is definitely having a moment, as if some very powerful people had decided to turn the old, wise spiritual saying on its head, proposing instead, "Let us see now what hate can do." One of the things I believe is that love, unlike hate, cannot easily provoke hate, but hate almost always freshly spurs at least some of us to deeper, more obvious, more productive love. And therein I take some hope. Once hate has burned for a while and mostly burned itself out, love so often surges like prairie plants resprouting, even germinating, after a grass fire. We want to be among those who are always eager and watching for that return of green. And, truth be known, the powerful haters can create their spectacles of cruelty, terrorize the vulnerable, and intimidate the rest, but they haven't--could never--stop the flow of love and neighborliness that is is the foundation of any functioning society. This particular swell of craven destruction and predation will end, leaving lots of needless harm and trauma in its wake, and, as usual, the meek will inherit what's left of the earth, pick up the pieces, and make something beautiful from it.
Now for the goods you are probably really here for: family member news.
Terah, 10:
Terah and her tender, spunky heart have helped keep us smiling and hugging through everything this year has placed in our laps. She still has zero appetite for suspense or violence in media, though she has enjoyed junior ushering (at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriar's Playhouse in Staunton) at some Shakespeare plays that push the envelope on that a bit. She claims plays are different because it's easier to keep the feeling that the people are acting; no one is really getting hurt. She also tried her own hand at acting in the world premier of a play put on by our family at the Benner Christmas gathering. Terah appeared in every scene, adopting two different roles: Researcher #1 and one of the two Sgnomes. The play was set in Antarctica. Some cousins joined for a few scenes. They were penguins.
She has taken an interest in reviving one of our chicken breeds, the Blacks Run Brown (BRB), which we had decided to let slide due to lack of time and facilities. That breed is crafted to meet the need for easily tamable, productive chickens well adapted to a variety of confinement-based living situations encountered by urban backyard pets. She had already been enjoying caring for the remnants of that breed in a coop we had built for her to use, but this year we produced one round of hatching eggs from that coop and our friends at Oak Spring Garden Foundation hatched and raised them. Then, this fall, Terah and I drove up to their farm in Fauquier County and selected a rooster and four hens as breeders to continue the breed. As we picked out the Blacks Run Browns from their large and diverse flock, we had to go on visible traits and catch probable BRB individuals, then check their foot webbing notches to confirm. Terah kept pointing out one hen with traits not typical for that breed and saying she thought it was one because of how it behaved. Eventually we relented and picked her up. She was right, of course.
All the way up and back, Terah and I had music on in the car. The two of us are always the ones, on road trips, who want to play music, while others need breaks from it, so this was our chance to bathe our ears. I thought maybe we'd chat, with music in the background, but most of the time she was leaning forward, head in hands, listening intently to the soundscapes coming from the speakers. I asked her what she was doing. "I'm just figuring it out." Last year we reported her purchasing herself a guitar, and the update is that, while we haven't had a lot of time for lessons, we do get the guitars on occasion, and she's learned to pick out a few tunes, and in addition learned the chords for "Silent Night" in time for Christmas season. Music means a lot to her.
Much of Terah's time goes to playing with Alida in a wide variety of ways from the most raw physical pursuits through the most whimsically imaginative. At this point attending school six hours per day, five days a week with a whole bunch of kids her own age mostly does not appeal to her. She'd rather learn at home, with us. So that's how we're still doing it.
Without Grandma around to seek out anytime she didn't have anything else to do, Terah has had to find ways to deal with boredom from time to time, and ended up settling on cooking videos and science demonstration videos, as well as kid-oriented sciency podcasts as her strategy of choice. She's got an ambition now to fry a steak. We don't have steak on hand, normally, and usually don't purchase meats except for pepperoni because, you know, pepperoni, so I guess that's a bucket list item for now. Maybe when her allowance builds back up after the Christmas season depletion, she'll pay a visit to a meat market.Terah's practicality and her typical willingness to help out, not to mention her speed at doing dishes, are a balm to her busy parents' (and her more reluctant older sister's) psyches. She likes to get stuff done, especially when she's part of a cheerful team. Except when it's hot out.
Alida, 14:
In reviewing last year's letter, we saw that Alida was approaching Janelle's height. That water has now spilled over the dam, never to return: she's taller than Janelle now, but only by a bit, and hasn't quite caught me yet. She seems to be slowing down on growth, but you never know...She HAS, however, beaten me at ping-pong! Once. One game to 11, but we were all astonished. I was perhaps the least astonished, because I could feel it coming as I watched her hone her reactions in long hours at the table with Terah and anyone else who would play with her. She uses those long limbs to great advantage, and has a thirst for eye-body coordination that I can resonate with.
Sports in general are a particular interest for Alida, including, of course, soccer, which is the only sport she has officially joined teams for. This fall she was invited by a former Harrisonburg Parks and Rec Recreational League coach to participate in the Shenandoah Valley United travel team for girls her age. After much deliberation, she decided to accept, and it was a great experience for her. We only had to stay overnight for two tournaments, but some of the games were, indeed, fairly far-flung. Alida also enjoys the strategy and drama of watching sports of many kinds.
Alida has a high need for adoration. That is to say, she MUST find something to adore every now and again or she is liable to forming attachments with inanimate objects. So it was a great pleasure to everyone when the Coturnix quail eggs our neighbor Charlie gave us hatched last spring, and she was able to raise out her first batch of quail in the new mobile quail coop we designed and built together. Now, any time she has run low on things to adore, she has a good option right outside our house (though she still often pines for a cow or a sheep or a duck of her very own). She has 12 quail hens, and has each type of egg laid basically memorized and can sort them on sight, but that is of minimal usefulness for breeding, since she can't tell which quail lays which egg.
The passing of Sarah made a lot of difference in Alida's days also, as she could previously often be found helping Grandma with a baking project or snapping puzzle pieces in one after another at her puzzle table. She and Terah have continued to volunteer to test and label puzzles from Gift and Thrift for completeness, though not perhaps as many as when Grandma was heading up that activity.
Alida's sweet and energetic personality can still bring the pizzazz to any day, and she has an ability to fill a room with her emotions (USUALLY for the good), which ability was on full display in the play at the Benner Christmas gathering, when she starred as Atnas and filled one other role as one of the Sgnomes. She's somewhat attracted to theater, and thoroughly enjoys her exposure to the work of the American Shakespeare Center, where she is a volunteer junior usher.
Alida is our family's most attentive and specifically skilled baker, savoring the opportunity to dive deep into a recipe or technique, learn it well, and hone or adapt it. Her artisan pizza dough is ridiculously good.
Kali, 22:
Kali remains a full participant in family life, which is to say she continues to live at home, sharing a bedroom with both younger sisters (though many nights never makes it farther than the futon). We were grateful for her being here this year, as her usually calm, steady presence contributed to what stability there was in a tumultuous time.I have to brag on Kali just a moment: This kid has never set foot in a math classroom, and while I and Janelle have assisted her from time to time in learning math she was curious about, we've never pushed it on her nor verified that she had learned every element of every type of math considered appropriate to her age by the education system, so when her course of study at Blue Ridge Community College required a math class, it was anybody's guess as to what was going to happen (ok, we basically knew, but...). Not wanting to waste her time learning math she already knew, she boned up on some stuff and took the math placement test. She tested straight in to calculus, and aced it. She seemed to glory a little in showing us her homework, which might as well have been UFO intergalactic flight path calculations to us, but which made perfect sense to her. Academic success is one of the least important things to us about our children. Still.
Maybe that's when she also did the bulk of the writing for the family play, which was brainstormed by all of us to start, edited by she and the other two kids, but mostly...written by Kali. She also appeared as Researcher #2.
She still keeps those ducks. Duckie has been alive for 11 years now, which is half of Kali's life. She seems to enjoy having a reason to get outdoors twice a day, and (somewhat less so) to occasionally have some manure to hose out of something or a wire coop floor to replace. Plus, there is somewhere to go where one knows one will get greeted with quacks.Janelle, 47:
Janelle has had one of the biggest years on record! As mentioned above, she lost her mom May 6. It's hard for anyone to lose a parent, especially one a person feels close to, as she very much did with Sarah, but when you add in to that reality the fact that, over the past many years, life had been more and more organized around the notion of mutual support in intergenerational living with Mom and Dad, it can be appreciated that the change has been profound for her. It keeps showing up in her emotions, and in practical ways, and the two forms of loss often play off of each other. It is not a euphemism or exaggeration to say that she misses her mom every day, in several ways.
But she hasn't stopped living, by any stretch! This year has marked the fulfillment of a long-time dream and ambition to be a gestational carrier for a family that needs one. Conversations had been cautiously approached last year about the possibility with Janelle's second cousin and his husband, and every door that could have easily stayed closed in the whole process just kept swinging open. So, in July, an implantation was attempted, and it was successful! The baby is likely to breath his first air in early April, and everyone is pretty excited. What a beautiful and wholesome journey this has been; a special affirmation of extended and chosen family connections, and a sharing of her yearning for pregnancy and birthing that extended beyond our own family's needs. Has anything in her life, she wonders, ever felt quite so right? In early March when we made a trek over to Charlottesville for some preparatory screening, I composed the following bit of refined verse (ok, it's a limerick...sue me) in celebration:“To help a family relational
A candidate for surrogacy gestational
Offered her bod, to poke and to prod
It was an experience sensational!”
Speaking of welcoming babies, that is the other big thing Janelle's been up to. She continues working as a birth accompaniment professional, which is to say a birth doula. She meets with expectant parents for birth education and planning, and helps shepherd them through the natural and human-contrived elements of the process; part nurturer, part advocate. For her part, she keeps current on many issues around birth care and management, and finds lots of reasons to be grateful for the care received locally by parents and babies, and also runs up against some frustrations with power dynamics, politics, and the slow pace of change in medical systems. As she interacts with this with her own surrogate pregnancy and anticipates birthing in the local hospital, she is glad to know she has a relatively safe and kind system to birth within, and wrestles somewhat with things that seem needlessly complicated.
Two days per week, Janelle spends some quality time with her 2-year-old young baking, duck-watching, and trash-truck admiring buddy, who is the offspring of close friends who need child care in order to get their jobs accomplished. On one of those days, another set of friends gets a break from parental duties while their child joins the party for a few hours. She's not sure if she ends those days feeling younger or older than usual, but on the whole it's a fruitful arrangement.Janelle continues producing the cheese we consume, using excess milk from the dairy down the road (although the youngest two have become the resident mozzarella masters), and heading up the veggie processing and storage operations for the family. During these activities, she can usually be found with one earbud in, listening to yet another informative or mind-developing podcast. Her discretionary time is mostly used in walks with friends.
In the family play, she was lead (cute, pregnant) penguin.
Jason, 49:
This past summer, I wrapped up the last Sassafras Enterprises job I had had on the docket. It's not that there is no more work available...quite the contrary! But early last year I stopped accepting contracting opportunities. At first this was because we assumed I'd be fully occupied with building the pavilion, but when Mom got sick, that changed. Then, after her death, we all had some time we needed to put in in grief and adjustment, and there was plenty for all of us to do with that and with absorbing, to some degree, the extra work load that appeared when Mom wasn't quietly helping out anymore. Plus, Janelle's surrogacy commenced!
So keeping up with home, garden, and human tending tasks occupied most of my year, except that I also had responsibilities associated with the SARE grant for studying and advancing one of our pea breeding projects, now in its second year. Despite the executive function required for administrating a grant, the work has been a good fit for me, and I hope the SARE grant I applied for this fall around one of our corn cultivation methods I think has potential to benefit farmers and soil health is awarded.We were also awarded some money through the NRCS Conservation Stewardship Program to improve our pastures, keep noxious weeds in check, and remove some invasive exotics from our land. Between Janelle's doula income, that CSP amount, and the possibility of a new SARE grant, we are hopeful that my ambition to steer clear of construction work in favor of breeding and agricultural innovation can be realized. But if it ends up being necessary, it's good thing I like carpentry. I'm not selling off my tools yet.
I've also been spending about one day every two weeks swapping back and forth with work days between our place and our neighbors/friends/collaborators' John McRay and Christen Peters' place. This gives us a chance to spend time together in ways we enjoy, and helps move forward projects on each of our places that would be overwhelming or less efficient with just one person.
I continue to love music and not be quite certain what to do about that, beyond loving something that is a great thing to love. I entertain daydreams of pulling together a group that enjoys playing and singing together, and/or visiting some local open mic kinds of events, but I bump up against the question of available time almost immediately. And that is just one of several financially unrewarding hobbies I could see myself spending discretionary time on, if only I had more discretionary time. You could say that all of my ag innovation work is discretionary time that I've chosen to use in that way, since it is largely economically unrewarding, at least in a direct way, and nobody external to myself is making me do it. But it doesn't really feel that way.
Part of this is a function of the way my insatiable hunger for problem solving and innovation in agriculture has netted us a list of established yearly routines and life elements and projects that is, and has been for many years, too long and which is constantly trying to grow. Especially with Mom's passing, this year has been a reality check and a year of feedback on that dynamic. In the garden planning for this coming year we really made an effort to reduce complexity and trim elements out of the plan that were less rewarding or less certain, particularly because the surrogacy will be finishing up right in the middle of one of the busiest times of our typical garden year. We'll see how it goes, but we are giving simplification at least the beginnings of an honest try.
I've been wanting, over the past few years, to lean further in to the "professional" side of my agriculture work with plants and chickens, but it's clear I can't do that without narrowing it down so I can do just a few things well, and that we then need to also be realistic about which things we plan to keep doing in the name of feeding ourselves--keeping only those elements that reward us well and promote family enjoyment of gardening and farming.Alternatively, I could land some kind of dream job with a foundation or nonprofit in which I get to design and spearhead all the many projects leaping about in my brain, and enthusiastic others do the bulk of the paperwork and a lot of the execution, so that the ideas I am currently needing to whittle down and curtail could, instead, be profused with funding and amplified, ushering in a wave of practical innovation that echoes down through the grateful generations.
Oops, sorry about that, I didn't realize my delusions of grandeur were showing...how immodest of me! There are times when I wonder if all of this work is as important as I think, and then I was making a presentation at a conference yesterday on this pea grant, and it was well attended, including by some legendary Virginia gardening experts and seed workers, and people were interested and engaged, and at the end at least two people made sure to thank me for the work I am doing and tell me to keep at it. So that was nice.
So, on the whole, are we doing well? And are we doing good? When I turned 49 this year (which is 100 in a base 7 numbering system, by the way), I had to admit that that 49 sounds really adult. And adulthood seems to break down our simplistic divisions between things like "doing well" and "doing poorly," or "good" and "bad." Children experience life one emotion at a time, and feel like they are seeing things so clearly! I would say that life is a mosaic of struggle/ease, pain/bliss, excitement/boredom, wisdom/folly, pleasure/discomfort, heartache/joy, and many more polarities, and we move through them in endless unexpected combinations. And the one thing we know is that we don't want to miss it, or waste too much of our time in regret or doubt or self-loathing, or performing to others' expectations. And I think this year we continued some great strides in good directions on that, and we've done some things that have meant a lot to ourselves and others. So I'm going to hazard a guess that, yes, despite the sometimes hard year it's been, we're doing alright. P.S. I also appeared in the family play. I was an Iceitroll. Also as another character, who shall remain a mystery; unspoiled until such time as you may view the video or read the script for yourself.
P.P.S. First of the month family photos included here (with whoever was with us on that day!), though we missed December so we've included a few bonus ones.
