it's a small world after all

...as we all know, as it proves itself again and again in lovely small ways.

I'm in North Carolina, after a pretty last-minute trip based around helping Lindsay and her pop drive a U-Haul down to Richmond to store her stuff for the summer while she travels South America, before moving to Carrboro in the fall. It was a great drive - once we hit the South, the air got warm and the sun got bright and when we stopped in DC traffic, we could smell the honeysuckle by the side of the road.

It's nice to see hills and trees again. It's nice to sit in coffee shops for hours talking to every familiar face that walks in. It's nice to ride my dad's bike through these small-town streets and up the steep hills I'm not used to anymore, to have long conversations with friendly strangers, to spend afternoons on our shady front porch in Bynum with the dog.

This afternoon my mom and I drove out to the Piedmont Biofuels Co-op, past Pittsboro, for their weekly tour. They showed us the process in which the waste oil they've collected is converted into high-quality biodiesel, and all the ways they're trying to become sustainable, using solar power and teaching courses to interested homebrewers, starting a "farm incubator" program where they "grow farmers" - giving new faces a chance to get a start and learn their craft on the land before striking out on their own. At the beginning of the tour, he showed us the large solar panels on the roof of a shed filled with big containers of oil sitting to allow the crud to settle out at the bottom. Half the panels were shaded from the afternoon sun.

"We'd get way more power if we cut down this big tree that's blocking it, but we like the tree, so we're not going to do that," he explained. A big black dog was lying in the shade; a hammock was strung between that tree and another. I'm glad their work towards efficiency and sustainability hasn't yet required the compromise of a shady tree. That seems important.

There are a lot of really great projects going on around here that I'm excited about every time I visit, even though the most I can do is come check them out for a day, maybe hang around and help out and make some friends, and then vanish for six months or a year before coming back to check on their progress. It's a bummer, and it's at least in part a function of not living here, and therefore having nothing but time when I am here. There are great projects that I don't get involved in, in Chicago. If I was visiting there, I probably would make a point to check them all out and get excited about them, and wistful about leaving them behind.

Or maybe it's just that this is where I'm from, and so these are people who seem to speak at my pace.

Projects/Stuff I wish I could stay & get involved with:
Durham Bike Co-Op
Carrboro ReCyclery
Piedmont BioFuels
Bull City HeadQuarters
Paper Hand Puppet Intervention
Nightlight
Chatham Marketplace
Carrboro Comida No Migra (like Food Not Bombs)
and much more, i'm sure