Hope this finds you well! It’s been about 21 years since I last wrote (Summer 1987). Our family has grown and grown up! We have two sons, Seth, 24 and Sam, 18. Seth graduated from college and decided to move home. He has his own tree business and helps on the family farm.

Lynn, You recently wrote you were short on shop tips, so here’s something I’ve found useful.

The last few embers of the
rose are dying,
Homeward the drowsy bear
trudges through his wood;
Westward and sunward the wild
geese are flying,
Lemon-brown and rustling the
marsh reeds are sighing,
And the small grove lullabies
her brood.

The reader doesn’t need to wade through all of Paul Kingsnorth’s heavy intellectual artillery to understand the scale and violence of the struggle he details in his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Random House, 2025). The Machine of his title is the engine of technological progress that has been an ever-expanding constant in Anglo-American culture and economics for the last 250 years. The reader soon gets the sense from Kingsnorth’s exploration and analysis that there is effectively no one to blame but ourselves for the collapse of our values and loss of a modest, human-scaled culture, though those effects are definitely part of the mechanistic “progress” that feels ongoing and unstoppable.

Small Farm Rising is a little gem of a documentary, filmed and directed by photographer and filmmaker Ben Stechschulte of New York City. While it was completed and released back in 2012, it seems to have quietly held its space on the internet without a lot of attention. The film dips in and out of several ordinary days throughout the seasons on three different first-generation farms in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State: Asgaard Farm, Fledging Crow Vegetables, and Essex Farm.