On this fine autumnal day, we had our morning circle in Big Field, under the warm morning light, and sang our Good Morning Song. Red Oak helped us tune our senses into the elements, feeling the warmth of the sun on palms and closed eyelids, seeing if things smelled different with our faces turned towards or from the sun; when we knelt down to feel and smell the damp morning grass, we wondered if maybe the smell of dew could be called the smell of sunshine!? River Otter led us in a call and response song of deep gratitude—with the promise it would play into our lunchtime story. We had a game of Bat & Mosquito(es), which some students remembered from springtime: Red Oak and River Otter took turns playing the bat, who is blindfolded and has to rely on echolocation (“Bat!”) to locate the fleeing mosquitoes (“Mosquito!”) and eat them up!
We fueled our bodies with snack time before heading over to the teaching barn to dive into our cider pressing process. We got a steady flow going, with all hands on deck slicing apples into quarters, tossing those quarters into a wonderful apple-crushing machine, then taking the bucket of semi-mashed apples and dumping it into the barrel press. Once the barrel press had all our apple offerings within, we crowded around and set up the press on top, looking like a log cabin in the making. It took a coordinated group effort to turn the crank and drive the press down, and almost immediately we could hear a gushing faucet of juice beginning to fill our bucket! We strained the resulting juice into another pot through a cheese cloth and everyone enjoyed ONE cup of cider—we saved over a gallon to be enjoyed in the coming weeks.
We took a break from all that focus and had a bit of free play time in the field until we met up with the Woolly Bears (the 3-day Forest K group) for lunch. River Otter told a story of Rainbow Crow, about how Crow once was beautiful and had a gorgeous voice, but in the process of securing fire from the Sun to save the animal people from an unprecedented winter, all Crow’s feathers were burnt and singed and covered in permanent soot, and inhaled so much smoke that they forever sound like a scrappy fella (Sun’s reassurance to Crow being that we humans would never find Crow appetizing enough to hunt them!).
After lunch we played in the stream, an absolute must on a sunny day like today. We closed out our day with a massive game of Towhee, Towhee Drink Your Tea, and we were just starting to get into the swing of working together when it was time to have our closing circle, share our favorite things from the day, and say goodbye to those of us leaving at 1:00 pm.
For the rest of us, we hung around Little Field and the stream for aftercare, swinging on a rope swing, climbing, playing in the water, getting mud “tattoos”, building dams, playing tag, making a giant bird nest, and learning to jump rope.
What. A. Blast! See you all next week!
In Community,
Red Oak and River Otter
October 6, 2022