A pretty good day, yes, pretty good. Pete and I met with the City of Palmer Community Development person – Nate is his name—at 10:00 a.m. Nate, wearing a faded brown Carhartt vest and a baseball cap, greeted us warmly. He had piles of paper everywhere. A lengthy conversation about all kinds of things, some related to our visit, most note. We talked at length about his being ill and his raspy voice not being related to his being ill. We talked some about his vision for Palmer, and it matched ours. He and Pete talked about off the grid particulars, Pete educating Nate. We talked about Palmer as it used to be, and other’s visions for what it might become.

I suspect that we could have gone on all day, talking about various things.

Finally, we got down to it, the subject at hand, Summer in the Park(s). Nate is totally for it. He asked why I breathed a sigh of relief when he said this, and I told him that I wasn’t sure we’d get permission from the city.

I’m glad that we did spend time with him. Pete later remarked that Nate was attempting to establish a relationship with us. This gave me reason to pause, because if so, this means that he’s taking us, and what we are doing, seriously. I’d like to think that this is the case.

We returned to the hotel, and I contacted my freight contacts, one in particular that I had high hopes for. Wow – I was totally put off. Quite obviously, no energy was going to be expended upon the part of this person, on our behalf. Nope. No donations. It was almost as though the word was sacrilegious.

So yeah, I am discouraged. And this is in part because Pete has many other things to do right now, including fundraising. We need a miracle, someone to say, hey, yeah, so and so at such and such a freight company will hook you up. I’m not going to sit around and wait for this to happen. I’ll keep working on it. It will be a great day, let me tell you, when the boxes of books going to Kenya go out the door.

Next, I met with Pam and Becky, the two members of my writing group. The writing topic was, write about the word No Fair. I wrote about the literal fair. Becky was down because the plants in her office and greenhouse died during the temperature drop. And this was because the guy in charge did not monitor the thermostat. She lost some begonias that were 40 years old. The good news is that she hired Alex, who was a BLBP volunteer, to be her head gardener.

We shared our writing and then went our separate ways. I went for a walk with Pam Meekin on the outskirts of town. It was a good walk. I was trying to do as Nate said and relax because the work is always going to be there. Huh. When I got back it was still there. I guess in time I will be able to take time off.

Next: 24. 1/24/26: Five minutes a Day