2.14.15 It Was All About Love: A Tiny House In Leverett

     I once had an acupressure office, behind a farm we were living on with friends, in Leverett. My office was a tiny house, out past the farmhouse and barns. By the cages and fenced in runabouts of our 8 rabbits, who sometimes got to run wild; surrounded by my herb garden and a herd of sheep. 

     A tiny house, four walls with windows, and a door , that had been situated elsewhere on the property, but that we all somehow cajoled and tugged and then pulled with tractor, upon lengths of trees, to the cement moorings. Then we replaced windows and door, refinished floor, and there it was. A small thing with broad windows, off in the field of sheep.

 Some clients would come early, and skinny dip in the tiny pond far at the edge of the field , where a Kingfisher nested, and beautiful water snakes slipped through the grass and away from you, as you entered the water. 

     When we first moved to the farm, we had a rabbit by the name of Gracia, who turned out to be a boy. He looked like a Dobie, and was an escape artist who knew no match.

     Time and again we would hunt him out, and return him to a newly patched cage, only for him to slowly chew through or push apart, and be gone, once again.

      I would put out food and water for him, fearing the worst. But come the first winter, there was his burrow, dug deep, back beneath a good smattering of protective brush. The kids and I would follow the telltale tracks from his new home, over round the barn, to the sheep, where he evidently nosed up to them, shared the spilled grains and hay, and then hopped over to the spring that flowed all year round, out of a pipe, and drank. 

     Sometimes you could see the tracks of a visiting cat, and the game the two had played, leaping about together in the snow. We realized then how happy he was, how he had always hated being touched, and how enormous his world had become; and full.

     Up past The Mount Toby Quaker Meeting House was another pond, with a family of Otters that slipped and slid down the mudded banks, into the water all day. 

     When a good thunderstorm came up, I would watch its approach as I worked on the client. They would miss a bathroom, but be awash with the experience of having their health and their body’s release attended to, out in a small house, in an endless field, beneath Mountains. Such silence and serenity, the clean wind off Mt. Toby, swept through the windows. 

 One client was a British woman in her eighties, a poet, and psychic. At the end of every session she would sit outside and ask to hold a bunny; and then hold the beautiful creature, and cry. Out of loneliness. As I sat by her, and we watched the grasses wave and shift, the trees over the pond and up into the forest dance about, lithe and with ease. 

Once she was driven to her appointment by her querulous, wealthy daughter, looking at me oddly for the whole session, listening carefully to my description of the problems I was attending to of disc and alignment and heart.

After, Iris asked for a rabbit, and I brought her Baxter, an enormous black and grey gentle boy, who I settled on her lap, only for him to immediately bite her. Oh! She cried out, but held tight to the beautiful boy, until I could take him in my arms, her daughter more disapproving than before, Iris getting up with her cane from my garden bench, telling me he probably was out of sorts today.

 The water we drank and bathed in was spring water, brought down, gravity fed, from a spring on Mt. Toby, by a system of pipes put in place by farmers 100 years before . Before them, the Native peoples had similar systems in place, such was the quality of the water.

 After seeing my clients, I'd gather my three kids, and the other kids living on the farm, and off we would hike, up up into the woods, with beguiling snacks in my backpack, our Aussi racing by my side, up to the spectacular waterfall, where everyone would be out of breath from the steep path, and walk about in the freezing water, splashing and laughing and playing games, as the hot summer sunlight filtered through the statuesque Oaks and Maples. All the kids seeing how close they could get to the secret places behind the falls.

The lot of them would then come sit on the broad rocks rising out of the earth ,and have their snacks, chattering and teasing and making outrageous kid plans, while I sat and nodded , pulling one into my lap to look at a scrape , or settled a spat, then lying back to gaze at the vast sea of moving branches far overhead, until finally we would all be laying back, wordlessly watching. 

Such was the world without television or so many machines. 
When we had spring rains , the streams would flood the ponds and the outwaters. We would get into canoes , the rain pouring down upon us, and we would slide through the waters covering where once we had walked, paddling all through places that usually were inaccessible . Past the Otter's pond and further up into the remarkable swampy areas, brimming with duck and goose and mosses and ferns and wild things.

The whole of life opened up , in those days.

                                                                                                                      T 2.14.15