the Goodenough
Community

For years, you have turned each other inside out then backfilled the spaces. The evidence is everywhere: the new well, the larger than life carved heron, the Swamp. There are walking paths, and sacred groves, and stairs up the edge of a steep hill, ending where you feed each other. The buildings are the same mix as the people who occupy them– tired and damn near done or freshly painted or seeking renewal. The yurt is worse for the wear and the treehouse has been condemned by popular opinion and good sense. A dozen spaces have been purposed and repurposed with all the quirks that happen when geological layers of love are your maintenance crew. There is so much water: gurgling with joy, flowing with rapids and ease, standing and waiting like hope, sunk into the earth under our feet like hours of patience. Water collecting in apples to be pressed into the perfect cider of September. Water running wild, water standing where you want it and standing where you don’t want it, water from the sky and the neighboring hills, wiping this space and the spaces between you clean over and over again. There is the smell of pine and cedar, of human sweat and deer musk. There are tiny budding grapes, growing in the sun more robust than ever, fruits of a thousand hands and a dozen architects, struggling to replace the two. There are chipmunks now– play mates never seen in the early days– scurrying up into the eaves where nobody wants them but nobody wants the unkind ejection it would take to get rid of them, so they live with us in cautious trust joining the human pack who live together in cautious trust, the most human activity, and we re-learn play by watching our furry sibs chase each other through the trees. This place is art– painted canvases each with their own story, resting garden beds waiting for the lovers of Seed and Attention to lay down in them again, the ephemeral beauty of spawning salmon, perfectly folded towels like hospitality origami, places with playful names like Christopher Walkin and Taj Mahollis. Jumbled aesthetics turn this whole place into tapestry, into evidence of so many humans being and working so hard to be better humans being. There are whole lives shaped by decades. There are weekend warriors who passed through once and took river stones and altered knowing away with them. There are a thousand tethers to this place spider silk thin, barely remembered by the ones who stayed, and ferry boat thick ropes that bind for better or worse, in sickness and in health, thwarting death do us part by leaving finger traces in inherited dishes, and homes, and ritual remembered. It has been too much. It has been just right. It has been enough to love the land. It will be enough to rest here together, and surrender, like fallen sticks in the walnut grove, slow decomposition feeding the next regeneration. It will be good and enough. –Love Notes Everywhere was written and read by Yana Ludwig