July 2026

Dear friends,

It is high summer in our beloved Mid-Atlantic, and while a disorienting heat pushes sugar into the juicy clusters of grapes, I’d like to share some thoughts about time, memory, and forgetting.

Memory is strange in a world that insists on forgetting. From the ephemeral quality of everything that we build to the dizzying speed of the news cycle, it seems like nothing in our world is permanent. To some extent, this has always been true, and change is the human condition. This is why Heraclitus famously said that nobody “ever steps in the same river twice.” But our world seems to suffer from a particularly acute case of commotion and forgetting. More than ever, memory is our anchor in the ever-flowing river of life. 

We know this intuitively. As a society, when we learn something important or experience something remarkable, we build memorials and proclaim holidays. This kind of process of memorialization gives a civilization its tempo, its story, and its direction towards order. But sometimes it seems like we live in an era where we forget the importance of remembering. This is why the Czech French novelist, Milan Kundera, while under a communist rule that killed and imprisoned thousands, warned that forgetting was the force of oppressive power, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Indeed, memory is our anchor.

In our private lives, the case is similar. We celebrate feasts and anniversaries and take pictures to memorialize significant moments like private monuments. We create markers of meaning to be constant reminders of something worth remembering, not only because the past matters but because it gives significance and direction to the future. This is why we know that it is important to “create memories.” In fact, we often work so that we can have the time and money to create these memories that constitute our life and anchor us to its meaning.

This is essential to the way we understand life here at Casa Carmen. For we are largely in the business of creating memories. This is why people choose our farm to celebrate many important events in their lives—from graduations and birthdays to rehearsal dinners and all sorts of gatherings and parties. Celebrating these special moments is very important, but our intuition to celebrate the moment reveals something more important: that the ordinary is extraordinary, that every moment is worth celebrating in the full gratitude of its uniqueness. In the Casa Carmen way of life, every day is “special” and every moment worth remembering. 

But to do this, we must live lives that are intentional, present, and self-giving. This is why we are in the service industry. This is why we are in the business of living life in a way that memorializes each moment by offering it all to each other. While the world seems to want us to forget reality by ceaselessly shifting our attention from one transitory thing to another, we propose to double down on remembering it. We want to be a perpetual ode to the redemption of time. We want to live life as a continual toast and a moveable feast, relentlessly together. Not only is this more enjoyable, but if we consider Kundera’s point, it is of civilizational importance. 

So here it is to all of you, who are always worth remembering. 

Salud!

Enrique