Wheel Got to Turn:
Making Room for Grace and Goodwill at
Sittin Pretty Farm
Tommy Gardner’s place was a bona fide junk yard. Entangled in wild grape vine, scavenged iron behemoths born from booms of post war foundries littered the four-acre lot five miles outside of Viroqua on Cty NN. Among the Case tractors and spent trucks, an eight-foot diameter, two-ton iron wheel wreathed in giant ragweed, burdock, and prairie sunflower was slowly sinking into the loam. Tommy passed from cancer before I got the chance to meet him. I bought the property in 2018, but from the stories I’ve gathered, he was a rendezvous-attending, muzzle-loading, buck skinner, whiz mechanic who had a bumper sticker on his truck that read: “I’m not a hippie…I’m a well-groomed mountain man.” A voice from my neat, orderly Iowa farm upbringing told me, “knock back the weeds, tidy the place up, and get the junk to the scrap yard.” But as I began to build a house using old rusty barn tin and boards with an “After Life” motif, Tommy’s junk started making its way into a repurposed collage that would become Sittin’ Pretty Farm.
The two-ton wheel called out to me as it must have to Tommy. Amid a world sorely divided, I was determined to raise the wheel from moldering. Tina Turner famously sings, “Big Wheel got to keep on turnin.” The Bible says that Ezekial saw the wheel and the Spirit was said to be in the wheel. This was to be no shrinking back into Earth nor rusting away kind of wheel. Indeed, at Sittin’ Pretty, the turning of the wheel was to be the Spirit moving…Not stuck. Not stagnant. Not seized up.
With clarified purpose amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic, the wheel spurred us to put faith into action: Build spaces that could gather and hold the richness and diversity of our community. We would not molder away into the bitterness and negativity that makes us small-hearted and petty human beings. Raising the wheel and raising the barn became Sittin Pretty’s mission to keep the Spirit moving. With the help of many, we would create a place with spacious hospitality where all are welcome to commune through food, music, art and retreat spaces.
Sittin Pretty offers communal spaces where people can come together to commune and retreat spaces where people can rest and restore through nature and art. In addition to the Harry-n-Evelyn Party Barn, which serves as a community kitchen and event space, we have three guest houses available for rental. We also have an off-grid retreat cabin, Bird Song Hermitage, for those who seek retreat spaces that encourage imagination and positivity to be our best selves and do good. Each Friday evening during the summer and fall, we serve wood-fired pizza and local brews in the party barn. During the winter, we host a monthly concert series where we bring in local chefs to prepare and serve food while patrons listen to local bands.
Sittin Pretty is the community outreach arm of our non-profit organization, Further Along. The Merry Green Marvel is the adventure and service-learning arm of Further Along. We created Further Along, a 501c3, with the aim of expanding humanity through nature, adventure, learning, service, and community building. Through the Merry Green Marvel (named after our signature sleeper bus), we offer summer camps along Wisconsin water ways for youth, service-learning opportunities for college and university groups, and guided canoe adventures for groups in the backwaters of the Mississippi.
All of the proceeds (above operating costs) from rentals, pizza night, and concert series at Sittin Pretty are donated to the Merry Green Marvel financial aid fund and other local non-profit organizations. Sittin Pretty’s community outreach events and retreat rentals have allowed us to offer full aid packages for youth who want to participate in summer camps and they have also enabled us to donate to other local non-profit organizations. In 2023 we were able to donate over $21,000 thanks to the efforts of our many volunteers and folks who come out to support our pizza farm nights.
Our Friday night pizza barn and concert gathering is the signature event at Sittin Pretty and represents the dynamic wheel of interconnection through service. All of the labor for our pizza nights is volunteer. We have core crew of volunteers that commit to working Friday evenings through our pizza farm season (summer to fall) and we ask that the non-profit that partners with us each Friday send four volunteers from their organization. The vision of pizza night is simple: tap our collective genius to generate and share in the commodity of goodwill so that we can all do our best work.
In preparing for pizza barn season, we seek out other non-profits to share in the labor, love, and proceeds from Friday night pizza and music. Each Friday, we invite a different non-profit to be the focus and benefactor for the evening. They promote Sittin’ Pretty pizza night through their networks and send four volunteers to help in making pizza and extending hospitality. In return, their organization receives a guaranteed check for $500 from the night’s proceeds.
With volunteer power, frugalness for the sake of serving a greater good, and faith in our “better selves,” we trust that our expenses will be covered so we might expand beyond silos of individualism into the blessed bond of communion. And we have not been disappointed, in our first season 2022 we were able to raise $10,000 (2023 we raised over $21,000) for local non-profits as well as fund ten financial aid packages for youth to attend Merry Green Marvel summer camps.
The idea of a community service organization is nothing new. Church ladies have been busy running thrift stores, putting on fundraiser suppers with lovingly baked hot dishes often before the church steeple went up. Kiwanis. Rotary. Lions. Elks. Eagles. Moose. Optimist. Clubs rallying around the camaraderie of giving back provide the backbone for community benevolence all over the world. Perhaps the greatest lesson of community sharing comes from Native American traditions of Potlatch or Give Away. These ceremonies show the spiritual value of not just giving what you no longer value or need, but instead, being willing to give your “best”—something you might in fact be closely attached to.
Giving away your “best” makes room for grace to move around and flourish, ushering in abundance that far surpasses the thing we give up. I see this willingness to give up all the fun and restful things one can do on a Friday night among our volunteer crews. The gift that comes back to us is the Wheel turning: generating the light of our best selves through the blessed bond of communion and the commodity of goodwill. I’d like to think Tommy looks on and nods.
--Steve Lawless, Sittin Pretty Farm