Small world

"Ryite here folks, get one....one...one...going one twenty five....good tractor folks! A good year 1969....come get it now. We got one thirty....one thirty...one..thirty....one fourty...get it while its hot!...one fifty..one fifty...going once, going twice, and SOLD! to the lucky gentlemen in the overalls and straw hat!"

.....I met Elizabeth in a sunny field full of rusting farm equipment and colorful old timey farmers in tiny Montpelier Virginia of all places this afternoon. Elizabeth is a friend and previous student of mine in Ecuador five months ago. Such a world away and yet here she is!

Elizabeth just graduated from St. Mary's College in Maryland, though she hails from Portland Oregon originally. In between semesters and adventures abroad she likes to volunteer at Acorn, an intentional community full of interesting folk committed to all sorts of unbridled ideas too large to fit into the cramped box of conventional society. Instead they have created their own society of sorts and live by homegrown ingenuity, farming and operating a heirloom seed saving operation in Luisa County Virginia, in the heart of the piedmont.

She tagged along with some of the Acorn fellas out to have a look at the tractors for sale at a farm auction right down the road from where i grew up. And now here we are hugging and catching up in a wholly different context.

Both the grandness and smallness of this world never cease to amaze me.