2012

In 2012 we mosaiced a newly minted quarter into the greenhouse bottle wall as a date stamp. A patina dulls its shine from the accumulated touch of fingers, cat faces, and weather. As "the visible surface of a temporal depth"* this layer of grime lets you see that life happened. The 2X4s that framed the greenhouse window-walls rotted out, the old wood door decayed, and the greenhouse bubble is no longer a sealed up atmosphere, but patina lives on. It is the mark or scar of survival.

By 2012, potential catastrophes like food and water scarcity from climate change, or pandemics from chickens or pigs, had settled over the present as a nebulous threat. An ominous future saturated the moment with "affective facts,"* virtual events (at once real and/or imaginary) that demanded response and preparedness. Every year some wave of destruction crashed down on large populations, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Plant meltdown in northern Japan, famine in East Africa... Such events drove new anxieties, moralities, ethics, and changes in ordinary habits. They saturated political and environmentalist discourses with what Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart identified as a "pervasive apocalyptic sensibility"—a voice in American politics and publics that "mixes horror and hope, nightmare and dream, destruction and creation, dystopia and utopia."*** Some final retribution or redemption loomed.

Cosmic agents of planetary destruction also troubled people with fantasies of unavoidable ruin. The Biblical apocalypse had become unmoored from any savior's return. An asteroid might hit the planet and kick off a new ice age. The Mayan calendar ended December 12, and some New Agers thought the world would end with it in a final meltdown. The 2009 movie 2012 was a disaster spectacle released in time to rake in some money just in case its plot came true. Wild stories circulated on conspiracy radio: Planet X, a.k.a. Neburu, a hidden planet with hordes of demonic aliens, was swinging into orbit to enslave Earth. Or the billionaires behind the New World Order would massacre the masses, first weakening us with chemtrails. Why even get up and go to work?

It was as if the bleak future had concretized in the present, the concerns of one or five generations down the road urgently pressing on us now. Happening to us yesterday, not in a decade. The sky itself had a patina, the atmosphere smudged with greenhouse gas emissions. But somehow humanity survived in the billions. The catastrophists warning about Earth's peak carrying capacity maxing out by 2020 were as surprised that so many humans were still around as the 1970s' Casandras had been when we hit the year 2000. Certain ways of living had died. The fate of other species was also a different story, but genetic engineering made their final endings uncertain.

In those days the apocalyptic atmosphere felt like a homogenizing mood. After the world failed to end so many times, the post-apocalypse became a kind of patina, the visible surface of damage suffered that leant a gloomy beauty to what survived.  Patina's aesthetic quality suffused old things, worn infrastructure, and ragtag DIY techniques, giving them the queer charm of the survival circus. Rust was both inevitable and pretty.

We repaired the greenhouse bottle wall in 2023, embedding pennies in the mortar in a spiral shape. I patched a broken wine bottle with a smaller one cut down in length to fit. The clear gallon jugs cultivated a little habitat of mold mottled green, brown, and black. One penny popped off but I shine up the others with a scouring pad on a day with nothing better to do.

2038

*Madalina Diaconu, "Patina-Atmosphere-Aroma: Towards an Aesthetics of Fine Differences," Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, (131-148), 132. Like patina, "the atmosphere [can also] be defined as a precipitate, as a cluster that brings together and condenses quasi-immaterial, invisible particles of inhabitants, that are at the same time highly personal and impersonal... The most common reaction to atmospheres encountered in public or private places consists in a spontaneous attuning or homogenising of moods" (137).  While patinas are aged skins, "the atmosphere is spatially open and itself opens moods and life-worlds... By experiencing an atmosphere spread out by a place, the contemporary perceiver is brought nearer to the anonymous succession of all those persons and generations who ever lived and left their olfactory traces there, and becomes himself part of an enormous collective organism. In this respect, feeling an atmosphere is a matter of symbiosis with nameless and faceless bodies" (137).

**Massumi, Brian. 2010. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010: 52–70.

***Harding, Susan, and Kathleen Stewart. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285-310.

Greenhouse

Just before the housing bubble went POP! and Code enforced the Cathedral of Junk to comply, Vince brought me by the Professor’s house, a south Austin old-timer who collects special rocks from the railroad tracks down the street. Over the decades a landslide accumulated: cairns in the yard, smothering steps and porch, covering the house’s floor, stacked around the bed in a nest. Then the water heater burned a hole in the house’s center. Rain-soaked sheetrock melted down on the rocks below. The Professor was living on the back porch with his red dog surrounded by piles of stones.

We were visiting The Old Place to help move windows stacked against the house, and to take some home. They're weatherproofed with coats of mistint paints, pink, lavender, and lime dribbles down the panes. Some had been there forty years, salvaged from the University of Texas’ Mary dormitory before its demolition. The Professor says they looked out on Town Lake before it was dammed, when a waterfall flowed where the pedestrian bridge now stands. He lives in and salvages fragments of Austin's lost landscapes, some thousands of years old, barely buried under the present. Traces of the past no one else wants or can see engulf his house, awaiting scavengers who can archive or make use of them. That is how dorm windows that looked out on the vanished city came to peer in on the dream habitats of art yards. The windows now form the glass walls of Ephemerata Garden's greenhouse, a workshop at Further Farms, Smut Putt Heaven's windows/crutches structure filled with San Pedro and other cacti, and seasonal forms at the Cathedral of Junk.

Rock pile couch, take a seat. The porch overlooks a big drained pond once full of tropical fish and water lilies. We watch grackles dig for bugs in the ruined pond’s roots while the Professor pours out stories in a creek talk of whirlpools, grabbing things from piles to illustrate meandering lectures. He pulls animal bones and skulls from a black suitcase. “See how the antler was scraped away to make it balance? It’s weighted to your hands. Put it around your neck. The Apache and Comanche who lived here used this as a tool.” He shakes a piece of glass and a little bulbous stalactite from a pill bottle: “This is a piece of fulgurite, from lightning hitting sand. And this calcite formation has been altered, carved into Ixchel, Mayan Goddess of the moon, who walks with a rabbit on her shoulder. You can see her when the moon is three-quarter’s full, and the rabbit is very clear on her shoulder.” Hanson earned the nickname Professor for this constant stream of learned discourse. But he thinks of himself as a smart aleck scholar, ready to deflate expert knowledge--all those experts who don’t take his relics seriously.

According to Hanson, this neighborhood was one of the first spots in Austin colonized by the Spanish. “They found this populated garden and took over.” Anglos eventually built a narrow-gauge railroad steam-powered by a wooden locomotive--forgotten history down the block, where the railroad still runs freight into town. With a big pre-invasion population having lived around the modern-day tracks, he finds hand-hewn rocks everywhere down there and hauls them back up on his motorized wheelchair. He says every rock, bone, and piece of metal salvaged from the tracks carries some trace of human tinkering. Some stones have been hewn and weighted to spin perfectly, or to stand upright on a ledge's lip. Others have exposed pockets of glimmering geodes, or concave fishscales from flint napping. You can see whirls of amber in a piece of fossilized palm wood. There are animal forms and profiles of women wearing elaborate headdresses, carved by women otherwise constantly grinding on matate. He passes around a heavy fossil mammoth bone excavated in the backyard while digging a well. Someone tuned this fifty-pound sitar-shaped limestone rock to produce two notes. See the wear marks where drumming fingers endlessly slapped the stone?

Like the rocks and relics, the drained pond embodies a possible past, tracing a lost ecology of relationships between characters and landscapes. While anoles, geckoes, spiny lizards, and the bugs they eat burrow in the rock cairns’ million caverns, the pond habitat manifested the animal realm most intensely. “It was one of the most successful things I’ve ever done. It just worked: I built it, and all the animals came!” Two kinds of native tree frogs live in Austin, and one species moved in to the habitat. Sometimes they visited Hanson’s bedroom. Once a Great Blue Heron came down to hunt them. Vince remembers blooming lilies and insect dramas. “There was sort of an arms race, where the spiders built big webs over the pond, and the dragonflies would come down and cut the webs where they joined the trees. They learned to cut all the right places.” Not so many animals, since the pond’s been drained. Now the pond’s a concrete ruin, awaiting mortar patchwork and resealing with paint. Papyrus, pickerelweed, and dehydrated water lily roots survive in shallow puddles. Every day mockingbirds pick for bugs. Like the bamboo grove behind the pond, the patchy landscape is in ruins, gone wild and overgrown. Sun spears through bamboo blades to magenta and sky blue wood planks leaned against the back of the pond. More salvaged materials are propped against a little hand-built house beside the pond. The scene draws out a feeling in me of wanting to get to work, see it unfurl.

But what Hanson really needs help with is moving all the salvage wood, windows, rocks, and relics way from the burned-out house so it can be repaired. One day we work on relocating rocks to clear a path to the house. Another day, Vince gathers David and Susan, Scott Stevens, and Jen and I to make human chains and get some windows out of there. A good crew of six--we could start a moving company. While Vince hacks a path through the bamboo, Jen and I offer Hanson a Museum t-shirt illustrated with a Moontower, Austin's first public lighting from 1895. He reminisces, “I lived right under a Moontower in west campus. Back then a lot more bugs clouded the lights, feeding flocks of nighthawks.” The bugs are gone now, so the birds are in decline, but the Moontower is preserved as a historic landmark. “There used to be a lot more bugs all over Austin--and butterflies!” Like the Colorado River waterfall that disappeared with the damming of Town Lake, this is the city that vanished. In the face of all this ruin, he sobs, “I identify with critters more and more, because the same people who want to crush critters want to crush me!”

The Professor likes old things, ways, and knowledges--anything that somehow survives--and The Old Place is a sort of database of these. "I've researched all kinds of hippie industries, like fruit silviculture, making soap, raising tilapia." One day I drop by to see his repaired house with wheelchair ramp. A few folded blankets sit on the floor beside the huge loom he made them on. We talk about trees, a Chinaberry grove at the street's dead end that Hanson watched grow about forty years ago out of a scrapmetal "junk ecology" that sheltered saplings from the mower. “It’s good wood--they used it to build China cabinets,” professes the Professor. I complain about Hackberries at our house constantly dropping branches. Planted for fast-growing shade during Austin’s 1950s housing boom, now you see them falling apart all over the city. But the smart aleck scholar argues, “It’s a food tree. People lived off hackberry pies in the Depression. Lots of birds eat them, too.” Now the Hackberries provision invasive monk parakeets and migratory birds like cedar waxwings.

At first Hanson's windows formed a greenhouse tacked on to our front car port. Last fall I
framed out a new greenhouse in the backyard with lumber, concrete, and UV-blocking plastic roofing from Home Despot. On the north side I poured a narrow foundation for a bottle wall to build this spring or summer or some other vague future. The glass walls can be seasonally broken down and removed. They're cobbled out of double-pane glass doors salvaged by a friend and variously sized windows from The Old Place and the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Painted with gallons of cheap mistint lavender and bubblegum, Jen's mom nicknames it "Barbie's Greenhouse." It's an imperfectly sealed atmosphere that captures light and a little heat. We stuff all our potted plants in this bubble, just in time to survive winter.

2012

Hot Cold

Early September the temperature drops ten degrees from the summer's unbroken triple digits, falling down with scorched leaves. The feeling of winter coming on, when stars look brighter and sounds carry further in cold air. Early sunsets, less light in a day. In January, twenty-five degrees for five days, snow on the garden greens. When the weather is perfect, it is only shifting from one extreme to the other, a little window stuffed with feelings of anticipation for spring’s seedburst or the cozy melancholy of long winter nights.

We have been ricocheting between ever warmer summers and colder winters. This summer with the water blackouts the ground cracked open like it did in the middle of last winter's long freeze. The cracks are wide enough to shove down hay and manure. The ponds freeze six inches thick, goldfish and gambusia hibernating beneath the ice. Fleas and mosquitoes vanish. We weatherproof the chicken and bunny coop with shower curtains and heat lamps. In the summer a standing fan circulates the hot, stagnant air.

Sometimes we burn chopped up fallen branches in the chimenea, more for atmosphere than warmth. Compost heaps radiate free heat, warm enough to keep seedlings happy if you set them on top in the spring and rig up a plastic cover.* On hot days you can make a simple evaporative cooler by sticking your feet in a bucket of water. Wear as little clothes as possible.

We used to run an A/C that cooled the bedroom while shooting hot air at the pond. On the hottest stretch of days the A/C became useless with electricity blackouts. The big ice storm last winter knocked out the power but we still had water and gas. People are learning to conserve water and electricity not only because they got too expensive, but because they become unavailable to most for days at a time in peak use weeks. The cold isn’t bad because we have surprisingly cheap gas, but there’s not much you can do about summer heat.

Which is more inescapable and miserable, extreme cold or heat? Conditioned by air conditioners and heaters, bodies sweat and shiver outside. So vulnerable without our coolers and heaters, not to mention clothes. We get heat stroke, or body heat wicks off into freezing air. What are bodies, what is life, but this fragile balance of heat and cold?

2018 

* Gene Logsdon details his sheep manure heater for seedlings in Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing [2010], 132-133). "I keep wondering, nevertheless, if I am taking as much advantage of this free heat as I should. Red Cat Farm in Germansville, Pennsylvania, is testing an idea to use that heat in one of its greenhouses." 

Tunnels

Stray animals seem drawn to Ephemerata Gardens. Don't get me started on the cats. One morning a young black and white bunny hops around the morning glory patch. The neighbors were raising rabbits for food, had too many babies, and let a few go in the alley. We put the bunny in our chicken coop, along with another we find the next morning. They seem to be sisters; we never see them mate. A few weeks later we lift up the cat carrier top that serves as their makeshift hutch to find a dozen squirming furry bean-shaped babies. The father digs his way out of the coop and vanishes.

The local feed store buys some of the babies to resell as pets, and we give a few away. The two we keep--the mother and her albino baby--can't stand each other, so I build a new hutch with a wire mesh floor. The albino tunnels through the chicken coop's floor. Excavated soil mixed with hay and manure maddeningly blocks the door. Every few months I hawl out around fifty pounds of dirt to throw in the compost. Another poop chore, like the kitty litter boxes, often overwhelming. Keeping furry animals requires daily feeding and watering, cleaning up their excreta, sometimes feeling guilty of neglect or resentment at the extra work. Anxiety that a dog could break in and kill again.

We keep the bunnies more for their poop than as pets. In a pinch they could become food for starving vegetarians. The hand-me-down rabbits are our belongings, living objects with an instrumental value that serves our consumption habits. They are little solutions to the agriculture crisis of the loss of fertile topsoil. I try not to think of them as prisoners, vulnerable in the coop. Much more than means to ends,* they desire to tunnel and escape. They want to eat lamb's quarters, amaranth, and sugary carrots. They're so soft, except for kicking back feet, and completely silent.

2012

* "Ecological crises ... present themselves as generalized revolts of the means: no entity--whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood--agrees any longer to be treated 'simply as a means' but insists on being treated 'always also as an end.' This in no way entails extending human morality to the natural world, or projecting the law extravagantly onto 'mere brute beings,' or taking into account the rights of objects 'for themselves'; it is rather the simple consequence of the disappearance of the notion of external nature. There is no longer any space set aside where we can unload simple means in view of ends that have been defined once and for all without proper procedure... 'No one knows what an environment can do,' 'no one knows what associations define humanity...'" Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 155-6.

Fertilized

Ephemerata Gardens is localizing its own manure compost production in a closed loop. We have always thrown the hay and poop from our combination chicken hutch/rabbit coop into the compost heap. But the two bunnies and two or three chickens only make so much nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich manure. The perfectly round, oderless brown balls dropped by the rabbits can be added directly to the mulch around fruit trees and tall food plants like okra. The chicken crap, with its whitish urine and grayish digested feed, ends up all over the yard as the birds scratch around all day. The dried poops are like dirt clods, easily crushed into dust. We harvest the manure and soiled bedding hay from the coop and throw it directly into the compost to age for a half year or so. But the animals' poop was never quite enough to meet our compost needs every fall and spring. This year we finally broke down and built an outhouse to start saving our poop, too.

Shit has become so valuable that people have been hijacking sewer mains to suck out the sludge. Even with its low phosphorous content, urban fecal matter is much cheaper to harvest than operating the phosphorous mines that have become depleted anyway. Farmers and warmongers alike cry "More phosphorous!" But with bat populations (and their amazing guano) so low from white nose syndrome and the coprolites all mined out, where can they turn? Coprolites are mineralized feces of ancient animals, including dinosaurs--important to paleontologists as trace fossils that offer direct evidence of diet. In the 1850s coprolites were mined near Cambridge, England as a source of phosphates for farming. When the mines reopened during WWI the phosphates went into gunpowder instead of fertilizer. Last year, still scraping by to stay open, the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge sold its entire coprolite collection to a Chinese fertilizer manufacturer.

Our new toilet is a small version of the Rhizome Collective's brownfield commode. As a volunteer at the Radical Urban Sustainability Training workshop in 2008 I helped hand-build Austin’s first city approved, code compliant public composting toilet engineered by David Bailey. It took four years of review for the City to permit the structure. We built the toilet's walls with over a hundred bags of concrete mixed in wheelbarrows, poured into a plywood form along with demolition rubble gathered from the land. The design is divided in half so that humanure in one side can cure for a year while the other side is in use. The resulting pathogen-free nightsoil feeds the garden downhill from the toilet. The system produces free fertilizer while saving water (and the energy consumed in water’s production and treatment: "Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined"*).

In two years we will be able to use our humanure in the garden as compost. Meanwhile we are experimenting with a compost tea liquid fertilizer made of chicken and rabbit poop that has cured for a month, with some of our urine thrown in for good measure. If it sounds disgusting, wait till you bite into one of our huge, juicy tomatoes.

*Asher Price, "Green toilet wins city approval: Composting commode is first to gain official stamp," Austin American-Statesman, June 18, 2009.

2018

Busybody

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.

Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.

When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.

Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.

Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.

Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.

Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.

The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.

*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.

Garbage Collectors

"Ephemerata Gardens collects all kinds of objects and life forms... It is a miniature version of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre (or Garbage Patch), a museum of plastics gathered by the clockwise vortex of oceanic currents. "

Posted on FlowTV.org.