Everyone looks forward to the change of the seasons at Camphill Village, a community in central Minnesota unlike anywhere else in the state. With the warmer weather, new seeds go in the ground, the cows are put out to pasture, and the residents spend more and more time outdoors. This working farm near Long Prairie would be a special, idyllic place no matter who lived there. But it is the people who make the community truly extraordinary.

	Six or seven people live in a typical Camphill Village house. A maximum of four have special needs. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

Camphill Village consists of seven houses along with assorted barns and workshops sitting on 500 acres. It's self-sufficient in vegetables, eggs and beef. It's a popular bakery, whose cookies and breads sit on store shelves around the region.

Maybe the best word for this place is "kibbutz." But that description still leaves a lot left to say.

Camphill Village is also a licensed adult foster care facility. Fifty-five people live here; twenty-three are developmentally disabled, and their state and federal support provides the primary source of funding for the community. They range in age from 21 to 72, and the range in abilities is nearly as broad. Some need help getting dressed, others can lead shopping trips into town.

But in village endeavors like the Camphill Bakery, each contributes, as they say here, according to his gifts. Jan Zuzalek pours out trays of granola, one product her crew made this morning.

	Sarah Derkey, right, one of the younger residents at Camphill, works one morning a week in the bakery. Residents have an average age of about 40. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

"(They do things like) kneading the bread, and putting the cookies on the cookie sheet, making the cookies," she says. "Some people stand beside me and they'll learn how to measure and put ingredients into the bowls. Washing dishes, cleaning up. Packing the cookies, that's a little bit tougher, because it involves weighing things." Jan has managed the bakery for ten years. They sell to co-ops in Long Prairie, St. Cloud, and the Twin Cities.

Across the counter from Jan, Sarah Derkey puts labels on clear plastic bags for the bread.

Where is she from? "I'm from Minneapolis." How long has she lived here? "Going on four years now." And how does she like the place? "I like it. I like the people. I like the country, and the land."

Everyone here, disabled and otherwise, has committed to a communitarian lifestyle. The able-bodied residents of Camphill refer to themselves as "co-workers" and say there's no management hierarchy among them. They are not paid, and draw from a common pool of money for their expenses. Like the disabled residents, many of them have been here a decade or more and have no plans to leave any time soon.

"It's as if you had a wonderful musician, and they've been given a terrible violin." - Bill Briggs, Camphill resident

A few hundred yards from the bakery Tom Farr is preparing lunch in the farmhouse he shares with five other adults. It has been ten years since Tom first moved here with his own disabled son. He says he gave up working a job for living a lifestyle.

"I usually get up at 6:30 and help people who need help bathing or washing or getting ready for breakfast," he says. "Now I'm making lunch. In the afternoon I'll work on maintaining the land, the grounds, with another crew."

Behind him Martha Hahn is roaming the kitchen, looking for a Cabbage Patch doll named Emily.

"People like Martha come to help us cook and cut vegetables, and tell jokes," Tom says. "She'll have a joke, I bet!" And she does. "What is worse than finding a worm in an apple?" Martha asks. "Finding half a worm in half an apple!"

	Colorful yarn and fabric swatches make the weavery a comforting and stimulating place to be. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

Martha is from Sacramento, and moved here in 1990. She has a busy mind, and she wants to see what I know about IBM and the Fingerhut layoffs. When she talks about living at Camphill, it's partly in the third-person.

"They get together and they have a lot of work and chores they need to do and they go around to local churches and that type of a thing. And they get so that they have a lot of picnics and go on outings and go to restaurants and that stuff. And they go to movies and dances."

In another farmhouse, Camphill's oldest resident is waiting in the living room for lunch. Evelyn Keacher is 72, smiling, and has the look of a gray-haired grandmother. She entered her first mental institution when she was six, and she never left them until she became one of the first residents of Camphill around 1980. As soon my hand is in reach, she grabs it and begins to talk.

Evelyn talks about the different houses she's lived in, the projects she's done, the pictures on her wall. The others in the room wait while she has her turn with the visitor. Like many of the residents, she has a lot to say. And she clearly understands much more than she is able to communicate.

	Andrea Michieli, left, and Bill Briggs (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

At lunch the table says grace over spaghetti and salad. Camphill is vaguely Christian, though not affiliated with any particular denomination. The idea started in Scotland, and there are about a hundred Camphill Villages around the world. There are seven others in the U.S., though not all have this same pastoral setting. Residents are free to wander and explore outdoors in a way that would be risky in an urban or suburban group home. They spend a lot of time in the company of other living things: dogs, cats, chickens, and Camphill's 50-head of beef cattle.

And they get their fingernails dirty in five acres of organic gardens, turning out peppers, strawberries, tomatoes, and anything the Village needs. On this afternoon four people are out turning the soil to prepare it for carrots and green beans. Angela Michieli has managed the cattle for nine years, and just began coordinating the gardens as well. Now that warm weather has arrived, she says it is a joy to spot the link between sustainable agriculture and Camphill's primary mission.

"It's very therapeutic to work out in nature, both for the handicapped person and the non-handicapped person. You really get grounded when you're digging in the soil or when you're watching a plant of lettuce grow, and waiting and really feeling what it means for that plant to grow and how you survive from it," Michieli says.

	The afternoon garden crew moves down the row getting the soil ready for carrots and green beans. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

"Particularly the handicapped person, that, for some of them they have some serious difficulty in staying grounded and centered. You know, some of those people kind of want to fly away off the earth, their feet are barely touching the ground. And to be able to work with plants and to work with the soil really gives them a firm grasp on being here."

It's perhaps the same drive to grapple, to pull, to produce, that make one last spot at Camphill so popular with the residents. In the weaving workshop, Jeffrey Krafty is navigating a web of threads and four pedals on his loom. He laughs at me shaking my head trying to understand the complicated mechanism.

"This is four, and you put three in this way, two this way, and one this way, and then you slide it like this, and you press it all together," he explains, as he pulls back on the horizontal "beater" arm on the loom to pack the next row of his rug into place.

Jeffrey's a round, boisterous man with ruddy cheeks and a full gray beard: Santa Claus at middle age. He lived with his mother in the Twin Cities until moving here nine years ago, and apparently he carries a precise map of the Minneapolis street system in his head. He shows off a denim rug he has just finished.

	Jeffrey Krafty says he's glad to be out in the country, away from the crime of the Twin Cities. One hobby of his is keeping close track of the weather with a 24-hour weather radio. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

How many rugs has he made over the years? "I would say maybe about over a hundred," he says. At a rate of about one rug per week, that may be a modest estimate.

Camphill Village sells the rugs at fairs and at the Camphill open house, which draws a few hundred people to the community every September. It's a chance for the surrounding area to get a quick glimpse of the perspective Bill Briggs has given his four children almost every day of their lives. Bill and his wife Laura met more than 20 years ago at a Camphill Village in New York. The family moved here permanently in 1994.

Bill says he and his children have come to think of their fellow residents as wonderful musicians, who've simply been given terrible violins.

"The strings are not so good, and it's kind of out of tune, and they try to play a song and it might come out a little funny, but they could be a wonderful musician and their instrument isn't the best," he says. "And yet we can see see beyond that kind of damaged instrument, that there's something very whole and precious in the eyes of God. If my children get a little glimpse of that, it will be great."

Bill says every personality, every musician at Camphill rounds out the community in his or her own way. They each bring something distinctive and individual. At the same time, as the days finally warm up and the routine of summer chores takes over, everyone's pulling together to keep the village going.