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remember wondering how I could get to be as stout as Kat
    when the scariest thing in our neighborhood was a friendly but
    overbearing St. Bernard.
     
     
     

    While I'd like to say I was as stout as Kat, the
    truth is that a few minutes after falling in love with Greensun, I
    nearly fell in the creek.  I hadn't been able to resist
    lingering and watching the synchronous lightning bugs, so by the
    time I reached the watery moat in front of the house, the night was
    fully dark.  There seemed to be stepping stones in the water,
    but when I gingerly placed my foot on the first one, the algal slime
    slid me right off again.  Fifty pounds of gear on my back made
    me top-heavy, and there was quite a bit of cartoonish arm-waving
    before I managed to leap back to the shore.  In the end, I took
    off my boots and waded across the water (remarkably cold for June),
    then timidly walked barefoot up to the large dog standing in front
    of the house.
     
    "Lucy does not bite," read the homemade tag
    around her neck, as I discovered after warily skirting the dog,
    stumbling into the house and finding a light switch on the wall by
    the door.  While I appreciated the sentiment of letting me know
    Greensun's current full-time resident's name and personality, the
    irony wasn't lost on me—who was likely to be able to read the
    tag unless they'd already made friends with the dog?  At which
    point, of course, the biting issue was null and void.
     
    Luckily, making friends with Lucy was no
    problem.  After a solid night's rest in my sleeping bag,
    unrolled atop the couch right inside the door, Lucy and I set out to
    explore the farm.  And what we found was notes.  Lots and
    lots of notes.
     
    "Hens like to lay in straw hat on porch," one
    note read, then went on to include information on where
    omelet-friendly herbs were growing.  Sure enough, I found an
    egg just where the note had predicted, and even though the shell was
    green, the contents jump-started my jet-lagged appetite.
     
    "One scoop of sawdust down the hole after each
    use," chided the scrap of paper tucked behind the mouse-gnawed
    toilet-paper roll in the outhouse.  I hadn't noticed amid the
    cobwebs, but there was indeed a bucket of sawdust inside the little
    wooden room, with a quart-sized plastic container stuck inside for a
    scoop.  And after deciding the view of the creek, while
    beautiful, would also give anyone walking onto the farm a view of me
    with my pants down, I closed the door and found a much longer note
    about composting-toilet ecology tacked to the inside.
     
    Newly educated on composting toilets and why they
    were vastly superior to outhouses (sorry about the improper
    terminology earlier), I stopped by the log barn on my way back to
    the house.  There, I learned that peacocks roosted in the
    rafters, hens lower down, and that I was expected to feed
    both.  Back in the house, I was informed that "Flo the cat eats
    dry food" and that everything in the kitchen was there for my
    use.  The note-writer, while odd, appeared to have my best
    interests at heart, having provided most of the basic
    non-perishables I would need for my pre-meeting month.
     
    I wandered up the rickety stairs, ducking my head
    so I wouldn't hit it on the slanted ceiling as I entered the upper
    level.  An ancient set of encyclopedias and National
    Geographics lined the walls, along with hundreds of dusty books with
    topics ranging from cooking and gardening to poetry and
    fiction.  On a whim, I pulled down Stocking Up and flipped to the page on apple
    sauce...only to send another note spiraling to the ground. 
    "June apples should be ripe on the tree down the holler," this note
    read.  "Bring a half-bushel basket from the woodshed, then can
    apples in jars from the root cellar.  Fresh lids on top of the
    fridge."
     
    Spooky.  How had the note-writer known I'd
    look up apple sauce before the fruits fell?
     
    I pulled