Table of Contents

On Intentional Community
Ode to Peppers
The News of the Oaks
Murt in Driver's Ed.
Late Summer Abundance
The Walden Index
Acorn News
The Visionary's Dream
Days of Past Leaves
Happy together
Lil' Sass's First Accident
What I'll miss when I die,

On Intentional Community

What is this "Intentional Community"?
Can we create with impunity?
And with great vision,
Avoid indecision,
And follow our dreams with `genuity?
When first I went to Twin Oaks,
My friend said "It's some kind of hoax-
You must be quite crazy,
and certainly lazy,
To associate with such kind of folks!"

At Twin Oaks they love to dance and sing,
A nd celebrate solstice, fall and spring.
Rediscover old ways

by Peter Blanchard (Visitor)

Holly

Ode to Peppers

bending low on the
ground, i caress your
smooth surface
the sun bursts inside your red skin
as it licks and plays on my shoulders
i lift you up to find your secret places
examine your colors
sometimes running my fingers along your shaft
to feel its texture
some of you are wrinkled like an old man
others smooth like a
teen-age boy
all of you are beautiful
your bodies give themselves to me
and become my
nourishment

News of the Oaks

By Valerie and Others

The Natural World

An earlier summer rain knocked out the power
And though the drought-parched plants adored the shower,
The backup generators we had bought
Stood idle through their only time of call,
But not because of what you might have thought...
We didn't know how to use the things at all!

Deborah was hosting some guests;
They lived in her room in a nest.
And as they were born
They were each fed a worm;
They were wrens, as you may have guessed.

One night she was startled awake by a slithering, sizeable snake
All the birds in a fright
Just escaped from its bite
Because Deborah intervened
for their sake.

Isis

Murt in Driver's Ed.

gets dark quick
she wants out
teacher's voice gets louder
she raises her hand, asks:
and what if the car drives itself off a bridge?
almost eight, time for break
she's gotta pee she's gotta smoke
tired and wired, outta time

she cant hardly wait to get outside
her strides are sure, her steps are wide
she walks quickly down the hall
boots squeak against the tile
finger nails slide over the white wall
magic marker casually rewrites school posters

she walks out the door hits the stairs, heaves a sigh
the night is light, smells nice
she's already high and fly
perhaps her driving skills lack
but she knows where she goes
and you can't start to slow her down

i whisper from the seat behind:
this class sucks.
- devon

devon

Late Summer Abundance

Typical of summer here, we had an excess of fresh vegetables despite the extended drought-thanks to Cass and Pam's irrigation.

In addition, 1998 was a terrific year for fruit; starting with strawberries and mulberries and sour cherries in late spring, followed by the service, rasp, blue and blackberries in summer and apples and grapes as summer turned to fall... inspiring a variety of tasty desserts.

Food processing rose to the occasion canning over 600 quarts of applesauce in addition to the usual hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce. Mike EW and River paddled upstream to forage for wild paw paws. Four buckets full, a welcome relief from too many watermelons.

Our honey bees delighted in the weather, producing an incredible excess for the first time in years. And still to come are wild persimmons, some started from seed close to ten years ago - at last bearing their first crop.

Ah, the simple country pleasures!

Kristen

Stevik

Drawing by Olive

The Walden Index

1. No. of times the magnolia flowered this year-5
2. Gallons of honey donated by our bees-50
3. No. of bees involved in donation-420,000
4. No. of bees needed to produce one teaspoon of honey-11
5. No. of gallons of honey donated in 1997-10
6.No. of black widow spiders helping Ted with the compost run-3
7.No. of flies swatted by Gordon in Zk kitchen-301
8. Time it took to do this in minutes.-10
9. No. of jars of tomato sauce canned in one day-160
10. No. of Midwestern Capricorn titanium men living here-2
11. No. of hammocks a day that to be made to meet out goals-46
12. Gallons of water a day used in August-10,000
13. No. of times Ione moved house as a child -100+
14. Size of Stella's hot apple arm burn in inches- 6x8"
15. % of people not doing hammocks quota on second week of quota-38
16. No. of hammock making hours lost due to this-64
17. Miles driven by Tovar the car 300,000+
18. No. of rabbits brought as gifts by Barney the cat-7
19. Percentage of community income generated by the tofu business-10

Drawings by Olive

AcornNews

The weather's cooling down, the leaves are starting to turn, and the kids have started formal homeschooling again: it must be fall!

Folks who hear that we're a spin-off group from Twin Oaks often wonder what stormy conflict we departed in the midst of. I'm happy to correct that impression by telling them that actually we were born with a silver spoon in our collective mouth thanks to a long waiting list and savings in the TO bank.

Lately I've been marveling again at just how much freedom TO has given us over the years. It's a rare organizational parent that can send their young child off with $250,000 and only a few restrictions. While we are responsible for monthly payments on the loan, TO never intervenes in our affairs, and we are a genuinely independent group with our own culture, rules and personality.

That's been particularly apparent in recent months as the loss of the hammock business at Acorn has led to a time of more chaos than usual. Several members departed, including long time Acorners Barr and daughter Tobin, who are living nearby with friends Elf and Holly. This has left us with fewer adults than we've had in years, but after bottoming out at 12 adults we are now up to 15, including former member Owl (Helen) and returning associate Will who's back from a tour of Europe.

Drawing by Joshua

For a while it seemed like many of the communal systems were breaking down, and even group dinners weren't happening reliably. It's hard to know how much to assign to individual responsibility (or lack there of) and how much to attribute to the fact that having fewer people means we're all stretched thinner to cover the same work. For whatever reason, with the coming of fall we seem to be heading into an upswing. Ira has jump-started communal cooking and dishes. Some neat visitors have come through lately, and at a recent check-in almost everyone described feeling pretty good.

Now we need to see if we can turn those good feelings into more solid action. We've been spending down our savings this year as we struggle to replace the lost income. There have been efforts made by a variety of people in many areas, such as tree planting, book indexing, and making washable menstrual pads. Raven took a part-time job in town for several months. Peter and Moonglow and Will are covering lots more tofu shifts at TO. Meka has branched out in her massage business, doing well at Charlottesville's "Fridays After Five" on the downtown mall. There's no shortage of ideas on how to make more money, but we need to translate more of them into real dollars in order to balance out our spending.

The mainstay of our income this year is the tinnery business. We're crafting more of the cans ourselves (instead of buying from Seth, Ira's partner in the business), and selling at more fairs. We are now staying involved with fairs that a year or two ago we'd have written off for "only making $1500". New member Kathy has become a fixture in the tinnery workshop, and other members who were'nt previously involved have started to pitch in more, too. Of course, it all depends on Ira, who still does by far the largest chunk of work to keep the tinnery business going strong.

The other business that is fairly central in the community is our collection of agricultural products, from CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to farmer's markets, and from wholesale to hay sales. A terrible string of equipment failures-four broken tillers one right after another-has led us to realize that we need to invest in the next level up of equipment in order to continue work at this larger scale. The garden has also suffered from a long summer drought. Most of us aren't that upset that financial returns from gardening haven't been as high as we'd hoped for, because the most important thing about it is that it's in line with our values and helps us subsidize growing food for ourselves. However, over time we hope to learn enough to make it more profitable.

The Visionary's Dream

Cosima's sculpture

We are the body;
living destiny;
The Visionary's dream.

We
the face,
the mirror,
are consciousness reborn.

We are the vessel
and the hands
to build a better future.

We are waiting.
Let us begin...

-Indigo

Days of Past Leaves

We Share the Airwaves

Though Twin Oaks members have a great deal in common in many areas, there is great diversity in the matter of musical taste. One member dotes on New Orleans jazz, another on Bulgarian folk dances, a third on hillbilly banjo. One likes Montavanni, another Shostakovich. Add to this those who feel community ought to put away all the electronic devices and make its own music, and those who don't like music at all and sigh for the silence. For a while this was all right. We were putting up with each other's music—even learning to enjoy the variety—until we hit with the group who like New Folk, or Hippie Scene Music. This ranges from Baez and Buffy to the Beatles and the Fugs, taking in Dylan and Donavan on the way. The essential thing about this music, though, to those who love it, is that it is played uninterruptedly at the top volume. One works by it, plays by it, makes love by it.

Almost, almost we managed to live with this, too. We had our new building to escape to, for the only record player was in the house. Then someone found a player and installed it in the new building. We had Dylan before breakfast and the Beatles audible even over the whine of the table saw.

We would have hit the ceiling, but there are no ceilings to hit. There are no ceilings to keep out the music, either, which meant that any record played in a private room was necessarily shared by every other private room.

Our approach to all such problems is through Bitch Day. Bitch Day duly arrived, the problem was aired. But discussing it is not the same thing as solving it. The best we can do with our facilities is to compromise. We made a crude arithmetical compromise (about 1/5 of our new membership loves this music; therefore it may be played a certain numbers of hours, corresponding to about 1/5 of the day, no more than one hour of which may be in the new building), but we make no pretense that this is a solution. It is clearly a curtailment of freedom. Those who love that kind of music are deprived of it during most of the day; those who have grown to hate it must still put up with it for part of every day.

Most of the solutions that a community must work out to such problems are like this one—compromises that involve all parties giving in a little. In the long run the answers lie in affluence—soundproof quarters, special music rooms, etc. Lacking affluence we do the best we can by simply sharing the air waves the same way we share any other scarce commodity—equally, as far as it goes.

Thankfully, these days our living quarters are much more private, so one can enjoy their own taste of music in relative privacy. We are generally very tolerant of each other's music in public spaces.. The full range of musical genres can be heard in the Zhankoye kitchen, where the hard work of cooks and k-shift crews is made more pleasant, at least for one of the workers.

Happy together
high in the tulip tree,
cicada singing

-Alyosha

Lil' Sass's First Accident

My sister, Lil ' Sass, got herself in an accident last night. It weren't her fault. She was driving down one of them winding, dirt and gravel, country roads, when a deer leapt out of the woods, flung itself against the front grill, before sailing over the truck to land several feet behind. Pa was pissed. Not as much about the accident, as he was about Lil' Sass letting two guys haul off the carcass.

"That venison was damn well tenderized," Pa exclaimed. Lil' Sass just hung her head, she was more worried about the neighbors, after all, it was their truck she had taken without permission.

It was the sheriff who brought Lil' Sass home. Because of the hour, he would have prreferred to keep her overnight at the local lock-up. Lil' Sass was only fifteen though, and the sheriff worried she would be influenced by all those incorrigibles already enjoying the county's hospitality. As it was, Lil' Sass had to contend with all of Pa's drinking buddies standing around the kitchen sink, slapping each other and the sheriff on the back, reminding the sheriff of all the times he brought them home after a night of teenage pranks.

The sheriff was not amused. He felt all this good ol’ boy hi-jinx would give the wrong impression to Lil’ Sass. He threatened to lock them all up for being drunk in public. They laughed and offered him a sip off the bottle. The sheriff grumbled, scratched his thinning gray head, then took off his hat, his badge and his gun, setting them on the counter before putting the bottle to his lips.

The sheriff told Pa, that the neighbors wouldn’t likely be as cavalier about the incident. Pa asked what the fuck he meant by cavalier. Pa thought the word had something to do with colored folk. Then the phone rang. It was the neighbor’s lawyer. The lawyer used a bunch of words, rattling them off so fast, we could all hear them, as Pa held the phone away from his ear. Pa grimaced. Maybe he didn’t understand the words. Maybe it was the liquor. Anyway Pa yelled and cussed and someone hung up on someone else. It happened so fast we all couldn’t tell who slammed the phone down first.

Pa never had much liking for the neighbors. They was big city folks, bought the property next door when old man Fraizer passed on. Pa tried to be friendly, offered to cut their hay for a portion. They said no thanks and sent down a hired man to cut down their field like they was mowing a lawn. Then once they had a big ol’ bar-b-que with lots of folks driving in from the city. Pa felt they should have stopped by with an invite. Pa could smell pork roasting and all that hooping and hollering surely meant they was liquored up!

Pa came to think the neighbors, being big city folk, felt themselves all high and mighty, too good for the likes of him. Pa never had much use for the high and mighty. He was a working man, living in a house his granddaddy built with his own two hands. Pa's buddies, standing around the kitchen, drinking Pa's whiskey agreed. They was all working men too. Their grand daddies had known and sipped whiskey with Pa's granddaddy in this very same kitchen. They was all tired of high and mighty big city folk coming into the county, buying up property they had no real use for, every other weekend driving through town in their shiny new trucks, saying how quaint everything was, as if all this down home country living was a show put on just for them.

Even worse than big city folks, Pa hated lawyers. Lawyers were always in somebody's business, Pa would say. Pa thought people should be able to work out their differences man to man. He saw no need to involve any fast talking shuckster, who could separate a man from his money faster than any woman or preacher ever could. After Pa had hung up the phone, we found out that the big city lawyer had been a woman. I had never heard Pa cuss a woman before, except for Ma and she rightly cussed back. Pa said lawyershad no sex. They was all demon spawn, doing the work of the devil, leading good folk astray.

The lawyer told Pa, he was liable for any damages. Pa said he would damn well pay anything needing paying, that he always took care of his own, and weren't beholden to any man or lawyer. When Pa said that, he assumed it would be enough. To Pa, a man's word was his honor. The lawyer must have wanted more than Pa's word of honor and that, I guess, was what got Pa all a' cussing.

During all this, Lil' Sass sat quietly at the kitchen table with Ma holding her hand and speaking quietly with her. All Lil' Sass wanted, was to go to town with her friends and pick up a video. She hadn't thought anyone would know she had taken the truck. I got to wondering if she had ever done this before.

Pa stopped cussing. The sheriff was looking a mite uncomfortable. He thanked Pa for the whiskey, picked up his hat, badge, and gun, then told Pa he'd check back in a few days. If the damages were paid, the neighbors said they wouldn't press charges. Pa shook the sheriff's hand and thanked him kindly. He told the sheriff he always paid what he owed.

The sheriff left. Pa's drinking buddies settled down and passed the bottle. Pa came over and ran his fingers through Lil' Sass's hair. He called her a hellion, said she was to stay out of trouble, suggested she get a job to make up the damages he was going to pay, and said he loved her. Lil' Sass leaped out of her chair and wrapped her arms around him. Pa gave her a tight squeeze and sent her off to bed.

I stopped in a few minutes later. Lil' Sass lay on her bed crying. I asked her what the tears were for. She said she had looked into the deer's eyes right before it died. I told her animals weren't like people, they didn't have much thought running through their heads. Animals either lived or died, with not much in between. Lil' Sass said she weren't crying for the deer. She was crying because when Pa had reached down to hug her goodnight, she looked up into his eyes and saw that dying deer looking back.

Sassifrass

What I'll miss when I die,

- Cosima

Who We Are:

Twin Oaks is an intentional income sharing community located on 465 acres of land in central Virginia. We are a non-sectarian community which espouses the values of cooperation and egalitarianism while striving to eliminate racism, sexism, violence, consumerism, heterosexism, ageism, and competition from our everyday lives. We believe in living lightly on the land, conserving and reusing as much of our natural resources as possible.

For information about our regular Saturday tours, or to inquire about our 3-week visitor program, please call during regular business hours or write to us at:

Twin Oaks
138 Twin Oaks Road
Louisa, VA 23093
540-894-5126