dispatch

This is another communication from the Enchanted Forest, where the gnomes are hard at work all night and the humans try ceaselessly and usually unsuccessfully to stay warm in the winter. Before too long I'm going to be spending all my time over here rather than just half of it, and I hope to do so in the spirit of occupying the earth.

The truth is, though, I don't know how successful I'll be as a farmer. I've been promising myself for the last three weeks that we'd get out back and put the garden to bed, pushing its vegetable remains down into the compost and resetting the heap with the help of some hot manure, an ultra-natural thing to do, but so far neither of us has been willing to lead the way out the back door, due to the cold. I know for sure that people were not so easily deterred from getting the work done back in the days when they depended on their garden patches and squirrel rifles for survival.

However, switching environments, going from an emphatically urban setting to a mainly rural one, will produce changes in attitude and behavior. It won't be like going back to an earlier haunt either, because even though I lived in the Enchanted Forest recently, in 2009, that community was rich, and my new home consists mostly of poor and working-class people, so the experience of living there is a lot more genuine.