First Day of Adamah

Today is the first day of the Adamah Fellowship, which I’ll be doing this fall, living communally with fourteen other fellows, working on a farm (which is mostly still under water from Hurricane Irene), and learning about sutainable, intentional, communal living and Jewish spirituality. I’m incredibly excited to be spending the Fall in New England for the first time in a decade. It’s only the beginning of September, but I can already feel that magical fall energy in the air.

Here’s the tent where I’ll be living for the next three month:

Although Irene was very destructive in many ways, she also had many beautiful effects. Diverse species of mushrooms have popped up all over the woods here (note the big ones in front of my tent), and streams, like this one, which runs right near my tent, are full.

Homemade Scattergories

I don’t know why it had never occurred to me earlier that one could create a more engaging, funny game by making up new categories to use for the popular Milton Bradley parlour game “Scattergories”, in which players attempt to come up with items in different categories that all start with the same letter. Under the influence of a few mixed drinks, my friends Kim and Rocky and I each made up four new categories to come up with the following list, which contrary to my expectations, worked even better than the standard lists that Milton Bradley includes with the game.

Our list:
Dental Procedures
“That Kid”
Articles of Clothing
Animals I would have sex with
Books
Breakfast foods
Oral fixations
Premises for Horror movies
Bathroom Items
Authors
Atrocities
Containers

So next time you go to play Scattergories, try setting aside the boring standard-issue lists and make your own.

Norway, Maine, USA

At first, when I got off the plane in Portland, the cynical New Yorker in me assumed that those wooden rocking chairs looking out of place in the airport waiting area were some clumsily self-conscious attempt to exploit a certain image of folksiness for marketing and branding purposes. But after spending just a short time here in Maine, I’m pretty well convinced that Maine really is the kind of state where they put rocking chairs in the airport, because they think it’s a nice way to do things. People here are so artlessly friendly I can hardly believe it.

But beyond how simply nice people here are, I’ve been most impressed in my brief stay with the local food scene, which rivals anything I’ve seen in those foodie hotspots of Brooklyn and Northern California. What’s most impressive is not the selection of local foodie offerings, from organic sodas and mead and beer to tofu and cheese and sausages. What really impressed me is that eating local is not some fad of the foodie elite here: it’s a really mainstream idea in Maine. Ordinary people here brag on their loal products and advocate for shopping and eating locally in a way that I usually only see within rareified circles of lefty food nuts.

If eating locally and sustainably are not part of a passing fad, but are, as I hope, part of a sea-change in how Americans relate to their food, then it would seem Maine is in the vanguard of that shift.