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 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. 

The wheel clarified our purpose and the uncertainty of the pandemic spurred us to put faith into action: Build a party barn  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 wood-fired pizza, local brews, good music and beautiful sunsets on Friday evenings.  

Sittin’ Pretty Farm’s vision as a non-profit is simple: tap the genius that is community to generate and share in the commodity of goodwill. We would seek out other non-profits to share in the labor, love, and proceeds from Friday night pizza and music. With volunteer power, frugalness for the sake of serving a greater good, and faith in our “better selves,” we trusted our expenses would be covered.  We wanted a place that would give us all a chance to come out of our bubbles and screens and enter the blessed bond of communion.

The forces to keep the wheel turning were close at hand. Viroqua is a community rich in food, music, and the Spirit of giving back. All our ingredients are sourced locally either by growing them in our garden or tapping into local food producers. The duet of Lauralyn and Mason of Rhythm Bakery in Viroqua generously offer us  66 sourdough pizza dough balls each week that become the foundation of our pizza.

There is no shortage of local non-profits that address the diverse social, educational, and environmental needs of our region. 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.* The overwhelming response to generate the commodity of goodwill from all has been, “Yes! Let’s do this.”

We’d be hard pressed to find a place in the world where there are more talented musicians per capita than here in the Driftless region of Wisconsin. From Bluegrass to Grunge to Blues, we easily found a line-up of musicians willing to contribute to our mission. One was a recent high school grad who we heard playing the Blues from a rooftop on main street in Viroqua. He agreed to come out and play his first paying gig out here. With the Wheel now raised and framing the Western horizon  bands play in front of it as the sun sets over the rolling, contoured hills and valleys making  their way to the Mississippi.

Essential to our Friday night pizza gatherings is a core crew of volunteers that commit to working Friday evenings through our pizza farm season of Spring into Fall. 

Robert: Kitchen Manager and Ingredient Artiste.

Catherine: Dough Pro.

Vincent: Parking and Traffic Control.

Zachary: Alchemist Conjuring Food from Fire.

Aja: Community Liason and First Welcoming Smile

Steve: Smiling further

Although we were near strangers to one another at the start, we bonded as crew in the joy of serving a call bigger than ourselves, a call to our common good; As Aja proclaimed, we became one another’s “restaurant family.” 

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