On one of my last nights at Dancing Rabbit, I walked through the village alone. It was frosty and the clouds huddled down close to the houses, almost as if they were trying to warm themselves on the fires crackling inside. The yellow glow from the windows was so inviting, the air so crisp and still, I felt like I had walked out of 2021 and into a holiday children’s book. There was a deep and penetrating quiet, the kind that only exists in winter, and only in a place where cars are few and people know how to surrender to the season’s call to burrow and be at rest. I’ve come to look back at that night with the poignant nostalgia of someone who has glimpsed another world. 

This is Emeshe, a recent arrival to reality after four months puttering around DR as resident helpful person and random-heavy-thing lifter. Even though I left the village several days ago to do a little adventuring before spring, Dancing Rabbit is still all around me.

I am still privy to the stream of community emails which inform me of the week’s gatherings, work parties, and meetings, as well as people’s travel plans, thoughts and requests. Things to borrow, things to sell, things to read, things to consider — the everyday clamor of humans whose lives are interconnected. Reading DR’s virtual stream of consciousness from hundreds of miles away fills me with a loneliness I can only describe as acute FOMO (fear of missing out). What was the theme of Javi’s impromptu dance party? I bet Kyle’s new cow yogurt is stellar. Who got those mangos Christina rescued from the Aldi’s dumpster? Not a fulfilling train of thought, I know, but one that I can’t seem to avoid as I look through messages that just a few days ago would have shaped the rhythm of my days. 

DR has also followed me west in the form of physical objects: food, gifts, clothing, art. These, however, don’t fill me with anything but admiration and gratitude. When I offer my friends some of Alline’s famous jalapeño “cowboy candy,” I remember the afternoons I spent harvesting peppers in Ben’s greenhouse; I remember the time I spent helping Alline boil the peppers in sugar and spices when her knee replacement was keeping her from cooking; I remember the stories she and my fellow sous chef, Daniel, told me of their past travels as we waited for the water to heat and the jars to seal.

When I light the soy candles Squirrel made to sell at the recent holiday fair, I think of all the hard work she put into making them as zero waste as possible — pulling the jars out of the recycling and cleaning them, melting the wax over her wood stove, researching which scents were derived from unsustainable sources and avoiding them. 

When I present my friends with long, white turkey feathers collected from the Fox Holler Farmstead I think of the afternoon Mae and I spent sorting and gathering them as they lay drying in the pale autumn sun; admiring their beauty, their whimsy, the subtle variations in the Royal Palm tail feathers, the merits and drawbacks of gray turkey coloring (she thought they were ugly, I liked them). Each quill was a testament to how no part of the birds, which were pasture-raised for Thanksgiving feasts, was to be wasted.

Similar memories are attached to Farmer John’s elderberry wine which will wait patiently fermenting on my shelf until April, to Cole’s hand-sculpted mushroom earrings which brought me ecstatic joy, and to the farm fresh eggs and cheese which I’m trying, and failing, to savor slowly. To me, these items are gifts in the best sense of the word. Gifts because I can hold them with an understanding of the effort, time, and knowledge it took to bring them into being. They are not commodities; they are artifacts of patience and skill — artifacts of care. 

These items of embodied care stay with me now, reminding me of a quieter world, even as I watch two delivery trucks and a honking Subaru vie for dominance on the street outside my window. These gifts are the yellow glow of lights on a cold night, making me smile from the outside as I look in.