Living in Le Corbusier, 2008

 At the Carpenter Center, Cambridge, MA.

You can sleep overnight in this wonderful building (Le Corbusier's only one in North America, and sort of an encyclopedia of all his favorite window types), but only if you're in a class and you're working on your art. At a certain point (around 11pm) the guards come to lock up, and then you're either in or you're out.

The happiest day of my life

 On the happiest day of my life, Andrea and I went with one of Iris's friends to a casa sociale, which translates to "social house"--as far as I understood, it was something like a halfway farm for recovering addicts. There we collected and centrifuged the honey from several bee hives. The honey smelled delicious, and all their animals were wandering around socializing--the geese with the hens, the baby donkey and the calf, the cats and the dogs. Meanwhile Andrea and I passed time with many of the young male residents of the house, which seemed to function more or less like a commune. At around sunset, the head of the household milked the cow and I drank straight from the bucket.

I don't know why I was so happy that day. It might not be the happiest day of my whole life (that might be the day I fell in love with the first person I ever fell in love with), but it was the happiest day of traveling, the happiest day I've been alone. I was absolutely floating. It stood out so clearly from all the other days.

 These several-week-old chickies look like some kind of game bird, don't they? Like partridges? Pheasants?

 The wind had ripped away almost all of their pace flag.

 After her goose-husband died, this goose fell in love with the white rooster, and followed him everywhere. He wasn't a very nice rooster and all of the hens were balding because of him.

 This cat was born without eyes. I feel like it's my urgent duty to remember these things (even more urgent than usual!) to try to put together the pieces as accurately as possible, which may lead to more comprehension about why this of all days was the happiest day of my life.

Morning, Casa Lanzarotti

 After we distilled out the oil, we put thousands of kilos of old lavender into the cows' stable. The whole farm smelled like lavender for days.

Dozens of photos of hatching chicks

 Hatching Chicks: The Definitive Collection.

The moral of this story (and the moral of all my posts about farm animals) is: animals are better than people. Actually, that should probably be the title of my blog.

 As soon as the little dark one hatched, he ran straight under his mom.

 The new daddy comes to check on his family. Just a few days later, this rooster was taken by foxes. We spent an hour searching the woods for his remains--a few brown feathers.

It was such a surprise to find the first peeping baby in the nesting box, right on time, three weeks after we gave the eggs back to the brooding hen. Though I'd been expecting them to hatch, it was funny and weird to find this little visitor where there'd been a humdrum everyday-looking egg just an hour before.