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These informal reports, filed every couple weeks by Roshi (and e-mailed to interested members), are meant to provide snapshots of what's happening at Chapin Mill, plus the who, how, when, and where of it.
This Dispatch is being penned in the farmhouse living room on a routine weekday. It's lunch hour, and as usual after the meal, there are people hanging out on the three sofas that are arranged in a horseshoe pattern around the low circular coffee table: a motley crew on a motley grouping of furniture. The residents could use this time, after the morning's labors, to nap in their rooms (unlike the day's guest workers, who have nowhere to lie down), but most usually end up quietly shooting the bull or reading.
One of the pleasures-and privileges-of staff
life is to break for lunch each day and find
 a nutritious and tasty, hot meal attractively laid out and ready to eat. At Chapin Mill the cook, Karen Lawrie, manages this single-handedly every day. Arriving from the building site, we tromp into the house in parties of 1-3, stomachs growling. Just inside the front door, shoe removal and stashing is a crowded business, as is the washing of hands in the one bathroom and washtub off the kitchen. All meals are served buffet style, as the kitchen table only seats six. The rest of the workers take their plates into the living room.
Last Saturday's well-attended Sangha workday at Chapin Mill
proved to be another demonstration of Sangha support,
and the kind of infusion
of energy that boosts the spirits of those who work out
here regularly. Not that those spirits appear to be flagging. But big turnouts always add zest to the work. When I get to the site that morning after giving dokusan in the Guest House, there are people on scaffolds priming the shiny hardware on the new dining room beams; three of the "mudding" specialists (see last Dispatch) wielding their trowels; a bunch of people brushing stain or a light polyurethane application to window and door trim and to the beams themselves; and of course the ongoing drywall work. Mid-morning break finds us milling about, in our dusty work clothes, in the entryway-future coatroom area, enveloped in a buoyant din of conversation as we sip coffee and tea. Sasha Pulleyn's Siberian husky works the crowd, getting handouts of chocolate sweetbread and vegan oat bars-special treats for us as much as for her. It doesn't get much better than this!
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