What is time, and what is it made of?
Butter? Water? Sand?
No matter. It doesn’t matter really. What was then is also now, and not just in my brain where timelines like to blend together and make my world confusing, but in actuality, too, if you believe in certain theories.
There are only two things that have ever made sense to me about time. One is the part of Einstein’s theory of special relativity that came to him as he rode away from a famous medieval cuckoo clocktower in Switzerland and had the thought that every moment goes on forever depending how far out into space you go. Time is contingent on space, and if the universe is infinite, then so are all moments, too. Nietzsche said kind of the same thing with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, which is basically the idea that time is an infinite circle.
The only other thing that’s ever made sense to me re: time is when my friend Elena said that time was just a big pot of soup.
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That being said, 9 years ago and also right now in my mind and forever some faraway point out in space/soup, Bill, Pete, and I are walking down the farm path to Ewok Village, lined with paper bag luminaria of candles and sand I placed there earlier today, the day of the harvest party at the farm where I live. It’s late night. Behind us we can hear the party in the open-air toolshed growing quieter and quieter. Their band just finished playing and the whisky someone placed on a hay-bale for them is making the lights soften and glow. Pete is having a moment. He says this is exactly like a dream he’s had many times, walking into the woods on a pathway of glowing lanterns, and he can’t believe that it’s just become real. And maybe that’s what the farm and this summer is, a dream. Dreamtime.
Not a dream only in that dreams are blending into reality, but also like in dreams how things happen one right after the other and you can’t always remember how you got from one place to the next.
You know the saying, “you only get so many summers?” This feels truer every year, and what also feels true is you only get so many truly memorable summers. This being one of them, it’s hard to know what to say exactly. Certain times are just hard to distill, especially when what remains are mostly bursts of images and feeling like the temperature of a horse’s breath on your cold morning hands, the smell of fermented vegetables and hog fire, the having left an entire life behind and then gone and lived amongst chickens who torment you each morning, and the kind of bursting embryonic feeling of growing vegetables while unraveling on the inside and out of that unraveling coming funny little songs that you sing to yourself alone in the fields. To tell of times like this is more like to pull a dusty patchwork quilt out of a closet and wrap someone with it so that they can smell and feel it, and then maybe nod off a little bit and go into a little dream.
Think of summer. Think of a farm. Think of a time your heart has fallen apart like an old hunk of bread. Think of a tiny flower sprouting out of it anyways. Think of heat. Like the incubation of an egg. Think of an egg cracking. Think of your hands in wet dirt and early morning. Think of garlic scapes, the curly stalks that grow out of the bulbs, and what your hands might smell like after gathering them. Think of poppy flowers in a big row next to a pile of rocks. (One of the kids visiting the horse camp saying “I didn’t know they grew rocks here!”) Think of an old wood-paneled station wagon left in the sun and how warm it would be to get inside it. Think of yourself speeding around the hairpin turns to and away from the farm/city as the winds of your life change direction and your thoughts whoosh in/out the open windows, curling into the smoke of the Pall Mall you shouldn’t be smoking but do…just for now, just for today. (Do you know smoke moves exactly like water, only not beholden to the laws of gravity?) Think of a pink woven hammock in a quiet clearing in the woods next to, but away from all of this. Think of walking to it on a grassy pathway along the edge of everything, along the edge of your life, walking into the quiet and laying down inside the hammock and just, resting.
Above you, trees. Cedar. Swaying, swishing, gentle. And you too in the hammock, swaying, swishing, gentle.
Just take a moment.
Hush.
Do you know what you want yet? Do you know how to get it? Or do you actually want nothing but this. The swaying. Because that is fine. Everything is fine here in Ewok Village. That’s how it is. Nothing needed.
Rest.
Allow rest to actually come to rest in your body. Allow it to root. Water it. Watch the rest grow and let it overgrow you as you let yourself to return to nature, like a building left alone. Let rest become you, and I will tell you the story of Ewok Village, the story that I am already telling you.
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Ewok Village is a clearing in the woods on the outskirts of the crops next to Malo’s corn, separated from everything by thick trees and a grassy pathway that goes along the farm perimeter.
At Ewok Village, there’s a mossy log, a wooden pallet, and a pink woven hammock that we ceremoniously hang in May 2013 with a six-pack of beers one of our first weeks living all together on the property — Matthew, Alex, and I.
I am having one of the best and worst summers of my life. It is busy and fast, hot and confusing, yet also slow and filled with moments of quiet reflection, many of which happen here at Ewok Village.
Ewok Village is Matthew’s idea. Matthew is the farm manager who just came off the Pacific Coast Trail with his dog Trout, the best dog I believe any of us have ever known with shiny apricot hair and a medium build; a retriever mix, and a smile for days/weeks/a cosmic eternity immeasurable as his goodness as he lays around in the oats and runs alongside Matthew, who seems to equally imbue a certain kind of magic onto everything around him. The two of them live in a small 2-bedroom house on the property that we meet outside of every morning to plan our day in the carport/clearing house for all the produce that we harvest and where we always listen to KPIG radio out of Freedom, California and begin the day with a Wendell Berry poem.
Matthew is one of those people who has a very specific personal mythology like this — things that he holds sacred, like KPIG, Wendell Berry, Trout, and ethically sourced meat. He cures sausages in the window of his kitchen, has a bow for hunting deer, and almost always has stew brewing in an old Crock-Pot.
My roommate Alex and I, farm stewards, live just down the bend of the grassy dirt road from Matthew, Trout, their cured meats and eerie magic 8-ball. Our home, the former staff quarters, is a big half A-frame with high sloping ceilings, two cavernous bedrooms, a living room, a funny old pantry that our coworker Micah sleeps in once a week the night before harvest days, and a small kitchen where for the entire summer I leave the jazz radio station playing day and night.
Red Barn Ranch where we call home for this time is a rundown former summer camp that was opened by Elgin Baylor, a basketball star from the 1960s Lakers who created it for inner city youth to experience farm life and basketball on an old court now surrounded by blackberry bushes out on the way to the beehives.
Outside of our house is an old bathhouse next to a filled-in swimming pool. Behind it is Larissa’s house. She manages the kids’ horse camp run out of the same piece of land. Between us and Matthew is a gymnasium. And right beside us is an ancient dormitory where we occasionally have to go to reset our wireless router.
I describe the place to my friends as the setting for a Goosebumps novel about a haunted old summer camp.
The dormitory is especially spooky. The first time Alex takes me in there, I notice the windows to the bathrooms are ominously painted red and the rooms are packed with things like egg foam mattresses and vintage roller skate boxes. Thinking we are alone, we hear strange noises and accidentally surprise two teenage boys who work for the horse camp playing video games in this dark spooky dorm where they’ve apparently taken up residence. How they kept themselves secret living in a building 10 feet from us I still have no idea.
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Ewok Village is where I go when I am alone, but not. It’s where I go when I’m on the threshold of my life. It’s where I am heartsick, confused, falling both in and out of love, all while laying in my therapist’s office, which is this fading pink hammock in the woods. It’s where I feel ashamed for pursuing a new life, for wanting it at all, and where at the same time I embrace the notion of being changeable. It’s where I try to forgive myself for being happy in a new and different way. Where I mourn the happiness I had before and have foregone. It’s where I make a playlist called “pocket jams in the woods.” And it’s here that I make the step toward trying to live in a way that makes sense now rather than before. That’s what it is here. The forest is the only place I’ve ever felt able to be this fragile. This kind of forest I mean, the parts of it that for some reason feel more warm and personified than others, like the trees could start talking and it wouldn’t be all that surprising.
In many ways Ewok Village is a place in the mind as much as it is anything else. Everyone deserves an Ewok Village, even if it’s only in the mind. A place to go between things; language and silence, work and play, balance and unraveling, strength and weakness, ego and id, love and loss, action and rest.
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What needs to be said when there is so much that could be? What I will say is this: summer is most summer when you don’t realize it. When you are in the thick soup of it, in the deep summer that feels endless. It’s only when you look back and realize that it isn’t endless, exactly, that you say one of those old folks things like, you only get so many summers. There’s wisdom in this but also the blues in the way that so many things are fleeting, the great majority of things really, and therefore almost no thing is for sure, nor is it endless. Perhaps this is why my ultimate dream is to walk through an endless orange grove, where you can’t see the orange trees ending in any direction. Perhaps that is why it’s hard to revisit this summer, because as deep as it got, even it ended and turned to a fall where I jogged quietly along the farm path we built the deer fence along before the rains started, and then when they did start, holed up in my big room at the tiny roll-top desk and still drove back and forth down the winding road to Seattle, just in a less hot and less fast way, not knowing where the future was headed, only that it was there appearing one frame at a time in front of me.
Emily is a writer living in Maine, fascinated by the natural and the supernatural. She studied creative writing at UMaine Farmington where she was honored to work with Beloit Poetry Journal and be granted an Excellence in Poetry award. In Seattle, she co-created the poetry journal HOARSE which was shortlisted for a Stranger Genius Award. She is a long-time writer and editor, and also practices nutrition, hypnotherapy, and herbal medicine. She embraces herself as queer and lives with her sweetheart and their daughter who asks compelling questions like, do butterflies sit in chairs to eat lunch? Most recently, her work appears or is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine, the Champagne Room, and Mutha Magazine.