Queen Noir
I don’t remember exactly how we found Queen Noir, but at the time it seemed to be a match made in heaven. There we were, two-dozen hippies with a burned down house, no food, the great frozen outdoors as our refrigerator to keep the scraps in, and a dozen kids with no toys. And there was Queen Noir, in a palace filled with toys – talking toys, walking toys, educational toys, toys that spoke and toys that played music, furry stuffed toys, toys with hearts and toys without hearts – and almost no kids to play with them. Not to mention the Queen’s fully equipped kitchen and her fully stocked larder.
Some of the women at the commune had heard there was a wealthy woman going it on her own in a centuries old brick farmhouse that had a preschool attached on the Shakerville Road and that the Queen was looking for additional kids to share the facilities with her son and the two or three other kids she’d found who thus far had joined her … all offspring of faculty at the University in the state capital, about twenty minutes east.
“No, we couldn’t conceivably pay tuition,” the women told Queen Noir when they met her at the Schoolhouse. “No, not even a token payment. But what we can do is add a dozen kids to your enrollment, and provide creative teachers to your staff – musicians, bakers, gardeners, artists, craftspeople, unemployed licensed reading specialists with Masters degrees in education, woodworkers, maple-sugar makers.
“OMG,” Queen Noir spoke her pleasure, “Are the gods now making house calls?”
“Holy shit,” spoke the commune women, “Have the gods just answered our prayers?”
Well, actually, what Noir asked is “Do you have lice?” And “Do you use drugs?”
And what the hippie women answered was, “We’ll all be here tomorrow, Nori. Come on kids, time to go home.”

Dear Ms. Towle, Franklin Town Librarian/Historian:

I had the pleasure of returning to Franklin in the 1990s to visit the land on which our commune, Earthworks, existed from February 2, 1970, until some time roughly four years later when it finally and fitfully dissolved.

My wife and I stopped at the general store for sodas and to ask after old friends when we noticed your impressive book on the history of the town of Franklin for sale on the counter. We opened on impulse to the index under “commune” and were pleased and surprised to find your history of our small moment in the life of this lovely town.

Though your words were mostly kind and good humored, and perhaps reflected how the commune and its members were perceived by many of the townspeople amidst whom we lived, the history you provided was limited in its view and somewhat derisive. I write this addendum to your rendition in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of the Franklin commune as it was and as it was meant to be.

Earthworks, or “the Franklin Commune” as we were universally known by others, was founded in an effort to “return to the land,” to master the skills that would promote agrarian self sufficiency, and to help create a society that would provide an alternative to the despair and destruction we were experiencing in our culture, our country, and our environment. We were upset about the state of world affairs and had set about in a manner we acknowledged to be experimental to improve them. We were particularly opposed to our government’s military violence, to the competitive behaviors we felt were inherent in capitalism, and to the selfish male dominated non-cooperative values we then believed were wrongly engendered by the nuclear family. The Vietnam holocaust was to us a source of daily pain. So too was the perceived destruction of our natural environment and the permanent annihilation of other living species. We hoped we could make things better. We intended to be social reformers and pioneers, not escapists. Our productive and social failings, and our now obviously erroneous views regarding how planetary life might actually and ultimately be improved, especially in the light of subsequent world and personal history, humble and embarrass us today. Yet all of us benefited from our time and experiences at Franklin, learned lessons not available in classrooms or cities, and grew as people, parents, and citizens.

Dr. Jane Wheelwright, a Jungian therapist, who shared some of the values we espoused, purchased the farm we lived on for us. Jane was always the “owner” of the Franklin commune property, but she imposed no restrictions on our personal practices or use of the land, and left us free to do with our lives and the property as we wished. Since we didn’t believe in private ownership of property this little fiction worked quite well. Jane never provided any money directly to us, but did pay the taxes on the farm, thus leaving us use of the property free and clear. In hindsight, her graciousness, and the fact that we did not actually own the land, influenced a number of our decisions and contributed to a number of attitudes and practices that did not serve us well.

Four couples, along with four children, began the commune with a very vague, somewhat shared, but poorly articulated vision of what our goals and our lifestyle were to be. Genuine participatory democracy was our ideal. Private ownership was out. Collectivity was in. Individual leadership was out. Male dominance was out. The nuclear family was out. We would try to live self-sufficiently, without dependence on fossil fuels or purchased goods. We would heat and cook with wood, grow our own food, do the farm work with horses, raise cash crops to barter for other necessities, educate our own children. The means to achieve these ends were often not agreed upon, and our vaguely articulated ideals were often in conflict with the reality of individual social and emotional demands, as well as the demands of farm life. For guidance we looked to romanticized visions of Native Americans and other indigenous “natural” people and to agrarian communes elsewhere in the world as we chose to selectively perceive them.

No matter how skilled or unskilled a commune member was, for example, we believed every person was required to learn to perform every task as an equal, whether that was pounding nails, shoveling manure, operating machinery, or mopping the floor and caring for the children. (“Give a person a fish and you feed him/her for one day. Teach a person to fish and you feed her for a lifetime.”) I remember the shocked disapproval of two men visiting from an Israeli kibbutz as they watched ten or twelve healthy and potentially productive adults standing around doing nothing as one inexperienced communard tried to back the hay wagon up the ramp to the barn for unloading at the height of haying season. Efficient we were not.

We also had a disastrous open enrollment policy. After all, since people should not own the land or the earth, and since private ownership was eschewed, anyone who wished to be a part of our commune must be welcomed. At times during our first summer well over forty people were living on the farm, which strained our resources tremendously. And although the core group of “founders” always held some primacy, we were often trying to give that power away as well.

Evening meetings were mandatory to process events and divide the next day’s work responsibilities. These meetings were also leaderless, frustrating, and inefficient, but in our view necessary to the development of the new society we imaged we were creating.

Our first purchase was a cow. That none of us had ever owned or milked a cow before in our lives did not deter us from this simple, safe, child centered, and immediately rewarding enterprise. Next we bought a team of horses, Jim, the steady and practical older gelding, and Mike, his stronger but far wilder and younger partner. Horses, unlike cows, are not easy or non-dangerous. They also don’t respond well to multiple handlers. Naturally, when word got out that we were planning to work with horses some of the old timers from town who loved and honored this way of life came by to offer instruction and encouragement. Particularly important to us was George Truax, who gave endlessly of his time and wisdom in the arts and crafts of horse management, horse care, and the use and repair of horse drawn equipment.

After our first cow and horses we acquired others, as well as chickens, pigs, goats, more dogs, and cats. The farm was fertile and richly blessed with good growing lands. It also had a remarkably healthy and productive sugar bush, with a more or less complete set of sugar gathering and processing equipment. Although we had only moved onto the farm in February, and knew nothing at that time about horses or sugaring, when the sap started running after town meeting that spring of 1970, like many other Vermont farmers, we set out our taps. We produced over 150 gallons of fine quality maple syrup that first spring, marketed the syrup to a natural foods outlet in New York City under the Earthworks label, and made what seemed a handsome profit. Given the labor we put into this endeavor we probably cleared fifteen cents per hour.

Naturally, when our horse drawn equipment broke down, as old equipment often and inevitably does, we were hard pressed to find or fashion parts. In this realm, we became increasingly familiar with numbers of lovely, profound, and philosophical older farmers who gave graciously of their knowledge, skill, and used machine parts. Ken and Grace Spooner were also important to us in this regard. We often had the image that we kept a team of horses to spread manure on the fields, to plow the fields, to sow hay for the animals, to reap hay for the animals, including the horses, so they could take out the manure, etc. We were their servants as well as they were ours. The margin of profit on our “self-sufficient” turn of the century dairy was slim at best.

We were extremely happy and also extremely troubled throughout our existence. The beauty and the freedom we appreciated were ample and ever present. The hardships and harsh demands of farm life to novices were equally prominent. Inordinate amounts of time were spent making the simplest decisions. We were ridiculously inefficient. We did not achieve our production goals. Our notion that we could raise all our food organically fell short each year. Yet we put tremendous effort into food production and gardening, planted and harvested a two-acre vegetable garden, produced twenty five to fifty percent of the foods we consumed, and lived on an unbelievably meager amount of cash given our numbers.

Then too, we were not prepared for the rigors of country life and experienced some profound and serious setbacks. Large animals who we loved and cared for got sick and we had no sense of how to help them heal. Some even died in our care. Potato bugs ravaged our fields notwithstanding a commitment that every man, woman, and child would spend one hour each morning collectively hand picking bugs off our crops, an endeavor we persisted in for weeks. And the August drought the summer of ’70, when our spring and potable water source quite literally ran dry, shocked us as well as seriously threatened ours and our children’s health and well being. With over forty people living on the property, and with the main crops needing to be harvested, the fact that we didn’t have water to drink created an energy and time consuming problem we had completely failed to anticipate or prepare for.

In this regard, our failure to harvest the oat field planted in spring’s enthusiasm reflects over commitment and the absence of good harvesting equipment, as well as an overall level of disorganization and naiveté. The collective harvest of the oat field in winter was a political and spiritual gesture as much as a practical one, where over seventy persons from elsewhere in the state joined us one cold January day to make our way through the field in a visible manifestation of the rewards of joint endeavor. The image was far more important than the actual meager product. The sheaves of harvested oats that stood in that field were a reminder to one and all of what we were capable of achieving …and what we had failed to achieve.

There was energy in the commune movement that was far greater than we were, a social force operating beyond our will or control. Whereas one day there seemed to be few if any communes in Vermont or in the nation, by the summer of 1971 there were easily one hundred separate conglomerates of people sharing living situations in Vermont who considered themselves communes. These ranged from “political” communes, with no base on the land, to “spiritual/life style” communes with no interest in politics. In the summer of 1971 the Earthworks Commune co-sponsored a “gathering of the tribes” at the Franklin farm. Over three hundred people from dozens of separate communes across the state showed up for this meeting and numerous projects whose scope exceeded that which any one commune could create emerged from the gathering, including a free health clinic in Burlington, a food buying co-op, and a children’s school at the Mt. Philo commune in Ferrisburg which drew children to it from numerous communes across the state.

The fire that destroyed the main house and wood shed right before Thanksgiving of our second year was a devastating blow and came at a particularly unfortunate time in the evolution of the commune. We had finally achieved a modest degree of stability. Our membership was relatively fixed at thirteen adults and six children. We had a very successful summer and fall from a production perspective. The shed was filed to the rafters with over sixty cords of wood. The root cellar held hundreds of pounds of summer crops, canned food, and preserved meat. We had devised a plan to reduce the number of mouths we had to feed in the difficult winter months, including a plan to house the children at the Philo Commune’s “Children’s School” and rotate parents as teachers to that site. We were prepared for sugaring well in advance.

After the fire we were forced to face the issue of our survival in very pragmatic terms. We had no place to live, no food, and no financial resources. A series of meetings about regrouping versus dissolving were held, mostly at Nat and Mimi Worman’s home. We decided to attempt to stay together and rebuild. We erected a makeshift cabin where we could cook and where eight crowded adults could sleep. Others slept in the barn and converted school buses. Many from town succored us with food and clothing; communards from elsewhere in the state, particularly the Mullin Hill Commune in West Glover, provided manual labor. We drafted plans to build a combination workshop and home, the very home where the Gagne family who farms this land lives today.

Building in the midst of a Vermont winter is not ideal to say the least. Daylight hours are pitiably short. Frozen boards split from the pounding of nails. Gloved hands are not agile. Yet we did survive that winter, the children went to the school at Philo, and the stock thrived. By spring many people from elsewhere in Vermont came to help in the sugaring and rebuilding. Naturally, numerous helpers also meant numerous visitors to feed and house, but we were now organized, even “specialized.” Only three or four people drove our team of horses. Only three or four people worked the fire and the fifteen-foot boiling pan in our sugarhouse. Guests helped cook, care for youngsters, carry wood, and gather sap.

I have a particular vision of that sugaring season which captures the essence of the Franklin commune experience for me. We were gathering heavily flowing maple sap on a glorious sunny day, temperatures in the high forties, using a three hundred gallon tank being drawn by our team of horses on a dray through deep snow. Dozens of people were tromping through the woods pouring sap from the tap buckets into gathering buckets and unloading those buckets joyfully and speedily into the horse drawn tank. As we drove the first fully loaded tank back toward the sugarhouse the dray hit a hidden rock and tipped over pitching the gathering tank off the dray and onto its side. Though we only lost about twenty or thirty gallons of sap, the tank was far too heavy for us to right and reset on the dray, even with all the people power we had. So we set about unloading the sap we had gathered in the tank back into the gathering pails and then retraced our steps through the snow to the trees we had just harvested where we poured the sap back into the very buckets just unloaded. It was as if someone had taken a movie of our operation and was now playing the reel in reverse.

Yet we did right the tank, and again made sweet syrup amidst our laughter, self doubt and self ridicule. We also finished the shop, planted the year’s crops, and persevered through similar joys and failures for a number of years more.

Then the war in Vietnam ended and the “counter-cultural” energy seemed to dissipate. Commune parents and their biological children hungered to make safer saner units to live in. Couples now separated could not comfortably live with ex-spouses in new couplings. Old disputes and disagreements as to how we would live were no longer promising of agreeable resolution. Founding members drifted off and the connection to Jane was frayed. Newcomers did not find the commune as romantic or attractive as it had once been. The commune dissolved. Jane sold the land. The sap flowed in the trees. The grass grew over the scar in the earth that had been our home.

Nearly half a dozen residents of Earthworks still live in Vermont, some in politically and socially active roles. Others have careers in carpentry, psychotherapy, and the law. Occasionally we get together out of on going friendship or just plain curiosity. I know where every one who lived on the Franklin commune twenty years ago is today. Except for Peter and Shannon and their son who was born on the farm and lovingly named Truax, after our departed mentor George.

Hassids

• see also http://vtcommune.blogspot.com/ – a franklin commune blog … and http://comicsbeat.com/rip-peter-mcfarland a very nice tribute to a Franklin Commune founder by his niece

We were sitting on the front porch outside the house early one summer morning, more of a six foot wide deck than a porch, with no railings and no steps, the porch an idea incomplete in actualization, like so much in our lives then, in front of the main door to the living room, the door we never used in winter because it let cold air directly into the belly of the house, and never used in summer because it had no screen and let all the flies into the house. Everyone was there to begin the morning meeting on what was a warm, glorious, bright, sun filled summer day, Vermont at its stunning, fecund best. The dogs and cats cruised around the dangling legs of the people seated on the edge of the deck. They rubbed themselves and wove in and out of people’s legs, porch support posts, and standing children. They snapped at flies and lolled in the sun. They gazed down the road. It was going to be a scorching hot day.

The chickens scratched around looking for grain and bugs. The flies buzzed the half empty breakfast dishes. People were rolling and smoking cigarettes, or quitting smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee or giving up drinking coffee, finishing breakfast or fasting, everyone awaiting to start the meeting so we could get on with the day, at least twenty of us sitting or leaning on the edge of the porch, standing on or near the porch, watching the horses in the field, playing with the kids, brushing their long hair, petting the dogs and cats. A most beautiful Vermont summer morning. And there was much work needing to be done, fields to be planted and harvested, horses to be hitched, trips into town, machinery needing repair, construction and maintenance projects, animal husbandry projects. Kids care. House care. We had discussed this all in last night’s meeting and were waiting now to make a few last minute accommodations, when far down the long driveway leading to the house we noticed a black Volkswagen driving slowly towards us, hardly kicking up dust.

No one we knew had a black Volkswagen. Natives of northern Vermont and hippies didn’t do little Volkswagens. VW vans maybe, although parts were hard to come by, but not bugs. Never. We were Dodge Dart, Volvo, and Chevy people.

By the time the Volkswagen reached the sugarhouse we saw that there were New York plates on the car. By the time the VW reached the remains of the animal carcass and the car engine hoist in the side yard we could see that there were two men with dark clothing and heavy beards in the car, two men wearing big black felt hats, big black beards with curly sideburns, and long black coats. The car stopped right next to the porch. The engine was turned off. The men stepped out into the dust of our driveway and the bright Vermont sunshine in their long black coats and shiny black dress shoes. It grew totally still on the deck, all eyes drawn to the VW. No one said a word. You could hear the flies buzzing. Our mouths were opened in anticipation. This is not a dream, I thought, although I wondered for a moment.

“We are here to find the Jews,” the shorter bearded man said.

“A CIA ruse,” whispered Charlie under his breath.

“We want to know why so many Jews are joining communes,” the taller bearded man said. “We are traveling around Vermont, visiting communes, trying to find out why so many Jews are drawn to live on them. We’ve been to Glover, and to Packer’s Corners. The people there told us the Franklin commune was rich and prosperous.

One by one people started to drift away from the porch, molecules dispersing from the center. Tasks all of a sudden seem urgent. There were so many things to do, and talking to two crazy guys in long black coats from Brooklyn who are looking for Jews was not one of them. I looked around and within sixty seconds there were only three of us left on the porch, the only Jews on the commune.

“Why don’t Hasidic women have equal rights?” Leslie asked them with her fierce, deep, and abiding feminist attitudes on florid display as she walked away before they could even answer.

“I don’t believe in god,” Hutcher said. You could tell from his pronunciation alone that he’d spelled it with a small letter gee.

“How can you not believe in God?!” one of the Hassids asked, quite genuinely shocked.

“Just a question of which myths and fairy tales you choose to believe in,” Hutcher said, and he too walked away.

“So, how many Jew live on this commune?” the taller one asked me.

“Well, three,” I said, “the gorgeous woman with the dark hair who just walked away from you, the guy with the bushy beard who just told you god didn’t exist and walked away from you, and me, who has a lot of work to do and is now also going to walk away from you.”

“Wait, please,” the tall one said earnestly, “we really do want to see your commune, to understand why you are living here.”

I’m thinking about this when two year old Maia comes running over to me from around the corner of the house. She has a smile on her face stretching from ear to ear. Her hands look like they haven’t been washed in days. She is carrying a piece of toast with honey dripping from it. Her clothes are filthy. Her mouth is ringed with crumbs. A squadron of flies is following her looking for breakfast. She is still the cutest sweetest creature I have ever known. And more than that, she has clearly been sent to rescue me.

“They need you over there,” she says, pointing to Barbara and Libby who are watching their little messenger and grinning while preparing to hitch the manure spreader to the old John Deere tractor. They have clearly sent Maia as their emissary.

“You are the sweetest little pumpkin I have ever seen,” I say to her. “Come on, we’re going to show these gentlemen our farm, okay.” I look at Libby and wink.

“Okay. Let’s show them Piggy and her babies first,” says Maia, who I pick up into my arms as we walk from the porch toward the big garden.

The way our farm is laid out, in a pattern established generations before we ever set foot on it, like so many Vermont dairy farms, the barn stands between the house and the nicest vista on the property. The idea being that when you look out from the front of the house, from the kitchen, from the living room, or from the deck, what you would see is the barn. After all, the barn was the lifeblood of the family farm, and apparently you needed and wanted to see it when you look out from the comfort of your home. Industry before beauty. The problem, of course, is that if you are hippies and the massive red structure is all you see when you look out the window you know you are being cheated of a view. And in order to see the stream at the bottom of the meadow behind the barn, or to even see the rolling hill rising behind the stream into the hardwoods where the sun sets and the moon rises, you have to stand inside the barn with the door to the manure pile open.

We walk on the rutted dirt road between the house and the barn, me in my overalls and big boots, Maia her floral dress and flip flops pulling me along by the hand, the Hassids in their black long coats and no longer so shiny shoes beside us.

“The field you see in front of you is our vegetable garden,” I say, “we have over three acres of vegetables under cultivation. Lettuce, tomatoes, summer and winter squash, potatoes, onions, string beans and pole beans. We planted it by hand. We weed it by hand. We fight the bugs off by hand. No chemicals.”

“It is so very, very beautiful,” says one of the men.

“You are truly blessed,” says the other.

And as I look out over the field in that moment it does feel as if we are blessed, although I have never thought of it that way. The sunflowers have started to bloom. Incredibly beautiful golden sunflower petals glisten in the morning sun. The light pouring trough the petals reveals their translucence. Drunken bees, drawn to the cornucopia of sunflower pollen, are stumbling into the aura of the flowers. In the movement of the sunflower heads on the tall stalks you sense the breeze.

At the end of the barn is the cattle run. At the bottom of the run are Piggy and her babies, a dozen of them grunting and rutting and crawling around on their mother who has been laying against the fence her belly fully distended. When she senses our approach she shakes off her slumber and the piglets to raise up on her stubby legs, alert for food. I show the Hassids the pigsty feeling a bit defensive.

“Run up to the garden and grab one or two of the tomatoes that have fallen on the ground, Maia, would you,” I say.

“We bred this pig,” I tell the Hassids. “The boar is in the barn. He’s just too big and nasty to let out. Takes seven or eight people and the better part of an hour to get him back in if he’s free. Tried a leash but couldn’t hold on to him. A very tough old man, Arnold. That’s the boar’s name.” I’m smiling. “We’ll sell some of these piglets before winter and slaughter the others for meat. They never cost us a penny. The first pigs were given to us. I know they’re not kosher, but they can be mighty tasty.”

“God is good,” says the tall one.

“You are richly blessed,” says the other

“This is so beautiful,” they say. “My God, look at this wonderful place you have here. It is a gift, a mitzvah, a sign from God. Look at those hills, those fields, those wonderful animals. Oh, God must love you so much!”

I like these guys. They see the place as it is, beautiful as it is. Even in its dirtiest aspect.

Maia comes running down to the pigpen. She throws the tomatoes inside the fence. There is joyous squealing and grunting before the tomatoes are turned into pork. She is laughing. I am laughing. The Hassids are laughing.

I take the Hassids inside the barn, show them the horses, and give them the independence from technology rap. They are attentive and appreciative. They seem to understand why this place and the choices we have made here make sense to us. I am struck by their enthusiasm. It is earnest and genuine. Our farm is, of course, spectacularly beautiful and they are seeing it for what it is. They do not see the warts, the mess, the broken down machinery. And if they do, they’re not saying anything about it.

“What magnificent animals they are,” says the shorter of the men. “And so many little ones. God must love you. It is a sign. A gift. You are so blessed. It is a marvelous wonderful marvelous wonder.” You gotta like this guy.

They ask me more about the farm, about how many people live here, about what we really do, about what inspires us. They are surprised we appear to have absolutely no spiritual or religious practices. They keep saying, “God loves you,” as if the fact they really believe it quite simply means it is true. I am a bit in awe of their affirmative positive energy. I show them the rest of the barn, the chickens, the hay we have harvested. I talk about self-sufficiency and political relevance. The dogs follow wagging their tails. I am aware of my dirty overalls, my hair, untended and uncut for months down around my shoulders. I see myself through their eyes, a rural Jewish giant who needs a shave with a beautiful two-year-old child in my arms who is still smiling across an entire continent.

“I really have to get to work fellows,” I say, “people are waiting for me.”

They nod. We start back toward their car. They continue effusive in their praise and enthusiasm. It is ridiculous, but I too am still smiling.

We reach the house. They shake my hand earnestly. Passionately. They climb into the VW.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I say, “good luck on your journeys.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” they say. “You have such a gift here. God is so good to you.” They are bubbling over with excitement as they climb back into their car. “Count your blessings,” they yell with that same ridiculous enthusiasm from the rolled down car window. “Remember God loves you,” they shout. “You are blessed one thousand times,” they say. “Remember to pray. Give thanks,” they say. They start their engine.

“Say a thousand prayers!” they are shouting. “Remember that God loves you. Tell God you love him! The world is good! The word is good. God is the word. God is good. Lay on your phylacteries every day! Remember!”

“You know,” I say, almost as an after thought I could have sworn I’d said to myself, “I’ve never put on phylacteries in my entire life.”

“What?” they shout in unison, “you have never worn teffilin? It is a blessing, a mitzvah, something that must be done. It is an honor, a duty to do so.”

It’s like a Charlie Chaplin movie. The car which had started to roll slowly forward down the hill screeches to a halt. It grinds backs up to the porch. The two guys in the black beards and coats jump out of the car and run over to me.

“But you are Jewish, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never laid teffilin?”

“No.”

“Laying tefillin is a mitzvah, a blessing. Please, if you would be so kind, perhaps we could lay tefillin on you here and now.”

I think about it for all of two seconds. “Sure,” I say, “Why not?”

So the short one goes back into the car and takes out a beautiful deep blue velvet pouch with gold embroidered lettering on it. From inside the pouch he removes the phylacteries, the small black leather boxes with the lengthy leather straps attached.

“Let us say the morning prayers together,” the short one says.

“This will be good,” the tall one says. “It is an honor for us, a blessing to be able to do this for you.”

“Stand here,” one says. “Give me your left arm.”

For me this has all become a little embarrassing. But it is also strangely moving. I put Maia down. I stand in front of them facing the early morning sun arisen over the distant hills as they wrap the ritual boxes and thongs around my arm and fingers. They say words in Hebrew, rocking back and forth, eyes closed, enraptured.

“Repeat after me,” one says. And I repeat the sounds that seem so familiar, even if their literal meanings are completely obscure.

The prayers are soon over. My arms are unwrapped. The ritual objects are placed back in their ritual containers. I pick up Maia who has been standing there watching this entire process eyes wide. The men are smiling. Their eyes are shining. We shake hands again.

“God is good,” they say for the hundredth time.

“God is good,” I say back.

They get in the car. They start the engine and roll slowly down the driveway yelling out the windows, “God is good.”

I hold onto these images. The incongruity of the Hassidic men in their black long coats standing in the mess that is our commune that morning, seeing the beauty that I saw, perhaps even seeing more beauty than I saw, showing me the very beauty they have seen, opening my eyes to a kind of enthusiasm I do not usually feel. It is good to have had this moment of phylacteries being wrapped on my arms as the working day is about to begin. I take Maia’s hand. We walk together toward the manure spreader.

The men call back once more, a faint echo that runs up the driveway and thru our land to end in the hills behind us. “God is good. God is very good.” I hear it softly. I see them looking at one another in the VW. They are laughing joyously. Giddy.