by Ben Hewitt
Fin’s birth did not slow us down as much as we’d expected. For a week or so, we hunkered down, immersing ourselves in the unalloyed joy and occasional confusion of newfound parenthood. “Is his breathing supposed to sound like that?” “Do you think he’s too hot? No? Then he must be too cold, right?” “Has he been sleeping too long?” “Is he sleeping enough?” During this period, we did not leave our land, exiting the house only to refill the firewood box, tend to the laying hens, and sweep accumulated snow off the solar panels. It had been a mostly snowless winter thus far, but there was a shift the morning after Fin was born and suddenly it seemed as if the snow would never stop falling. Every morning, we awoke to a fresh layer of white—three, four, five inches—piled atop the layer that had come the previous night, which in turn rested atop the one that had come the night before that. Somewhere beneath it all lay the grass and soil we wouldn’t see for another four months.
We ate whatever meals were brought by friends and family and, after a couple days, again began picking away at the innumerable projects standing between us and a finished home. Even in the face of those first sleep-interrupted nights, our sense of relaxation was immense and all-encompassing, and it occurred to us that this was one of the greatest unanticipated benefits of home birth: There was no need to pack up, to be discharged from the hospital, and to buckle our newborn child into a car seat for the drive home. There was no need, because we were already home.
Fin’s arrival heralded an expanded sense of what our place—and our relationship to it—could be. I think this was in part an emotional response to our entry into the world of parenting, and in part a result of ways in which we’d structured our lives even before his birth. A few years prior, I’d transitioned to full-time freelance magazine writing, and with the exception of occasional travel, worked primarily at home, an arrangement that generated a tremendous amount of flexibility regarding how I allocated my time. Until the previous fall, Penny had worked on an organic vegetable farm, where she’d managed the field crew. But we’d always planned to have her transition to being a stay-at-home mother, and now, suddenly, she was. There wasn’t one stay-at-home parent in our family; there were two. There was no juggling of schedules, no impending sense of Penny’s return to work, no need to fret over how to afford child care, no need to worry if we were leaving our newborn son in capable hands.
I feel compelled to explain how we pulled all this off financially. After all, self-employed freelance writing probably isn’t on anyone’s short list of best ways to make a quick buck, and the same might well be said of vegetable farming. Really, one wonders what occupations we might have chosen that would have been less financially remunerative. Competitive finger painting, perhaps? The whole production—buying land, building a house, working at home, choosing to have Penny stay at home—smelled vaguely of a trust fund or perhaps even something criminally nefarious.
Alas, there was no trust fund, nor were we cultivating Vermont’s largest grossing cash crop (which is marijuana, if you’re wondering). Instead, we had the benefit of skilled and generous friends, as well as a capacity to voluntarily endure more discomfort, if not outright hardship, than has become customary in our nation. Or in any modern first-world country, for that matter. While saving for land, we lived in the turd of a cabin, a tent pitched on land owned by friends, a small A-frame that lacked running water but which did grant us the giddy luxury of electricity, and another funkified rural shack that offered both electricity and running water (opulence, sheer opulence!), with the latter being frequently thwarted by the frigid winter temperatures that turned it to ice. Which is how it would stay until I took up a hair dryer and stuffed myself into the damnable crawlspace where the water lines had unadvisedly been installed.
Once on our land, we again lived without running water or electricity for nearly a year before finally rigging up a rudimentary solar power system. To bring water to the house, we used a generator to run the water pump until the pressure tank was full, at which point we doled out the tap water one precious drop at a time. We bathed in streams and ponds until the onset of winter rendered this practice too painful to continue, at which point we heated pots of water atop the woodstove, to be upended in the old clawfoot bathtub we’d installed in a drafty corner of the cabin.
Certainly, Penny and I benefited from good timing. Buying land when we did, in an era when land could still be bought relatively cheaply, before speculators and unscrupulous lenders had driven prices skyward, was not a calculated decision. We were merely fortunate to be in the market before the market froze us out. Perhaps we still could have managed to purchase our land ten or fifteen years later than we did, but there’s little doubt that doing so would have required assuming enough debt to have profoundly impacted our lives. It cannot be overstated just how enabling a factor our manageable debt burden has been, simply for having granted us autonomy over our days. This autonomy provides us the freedom necessary to grow our own food, and it similarly enables me to write for a living. It enables Penny to stay home. And it certainly enables us to provide Fin and Rye the freedom to learn as they do.
I am generally loath to dispense unasked-for advice, but on the subject of debt, I feel obligated to speak up, because there is perhaps no easier way to lose control of your life than by borrowing money. This is not to say you should never borrow. This is not to say that debt cannot be liberating. Indeed, for us, it was. It is only to say that debt should be utilized in full awareness of its tremendous power to define practically every aspect of your life.
We made our final mortgage payment in 2008, and now inhabit a home that, imperfections aside, is perfectly ours. Our house is still unfinished, perhaps terminally so, and I have come to understand this “done enough” state as a common curse of the owner-built home. Somehow, our home became bigger than anything we’d imagined, and it is not the draft-free vessel we’d intended. Winter winds sift through all the small mistakes inherent in our learning and thrift: the window I installed slightly out of square, and the gaps between ill-fitting beams; the cheap single-pane glass that separates our living room from the frigid January air.
So be it. This is our home. It is where Penny and I were married, where our sons were conceived, and where they came into the world. To be granted the honor of dying a natural death under the same roof I screwed down over the course of an insufferably hot August weekend, my tools slippery with the sweat of my exertion, the back of my neck crimson and peeling under the high sun, would be a blessing so precious I almost dare not mention it, as if giving it voice might somehow alter my hoped-for outcome.
If it seems morbid that I consider my death, and more so that I have specific hopes for how and where I might die, I assure you it feels precisely the opposite. Three years ago, my friend Jim, the same friend who helped me raise our windmill, who loaned us our first solar panels, and who assisted with so many projects that to erase his mark on our home would require nothing short of demolition, died in his sleep of massive heart failure exactly two weeks before he and his wife were to adopt newborn twin girls.
The experience of Jim’s passing radically altered my understanding of death, in no small part because his family did an unusual and wonderful thing: they left his body in his bed, and for three days opened their doors to anyone who wished to visit. I remember how it was to see him lying there, and how on the drive to the home he shared with his wife, at one point I flicked on my blinker to make a U-turn, certain I could not face the sight of his body.
I felt the same when Jim’s father called to ask if I’d help with the burial, help lift him into the coffin, help carry him down the stairs and out the door, help set him in the ground and fill the hole atop him, only fifty feet from where he died, only fifty feet from where, so many years before, I’d helped my friend raise the frame of his house just as he’d helped Penny and me with ours. All I could think about as we shoveled was the weight of all that soil and the permanence of being placed beneath it. How could I do such a thing
to someone I loved? But having done that thing, I can no longer imagine how it could have been any other way.
Is it strange that being so close to my friend in death has made me more comfortable with the prospect of my own? I think not, because it has taught me that as hard and as grief-filled an experience as death can be, it can also be a thing of enormous beauty and grace. It is the natural order of things, and as downright unfair as it may seem for a forty-three-year-old man to die two weeks before he was due to adopt his infant children, even that perceived injustice is part of nature’s story. My friend’s time was shorter than those of us who loved him would have chosen, but that painful fact does not diminish the gift of his friendship. It does not diminish his parting gift to me, the knowledge of how I wish to die, if I am fortunate enough to choose such a thing.
On our bathroom wall, Penny has tacked a poem. I do not read it every day, but I see it every day, and I know it well enough that I no longer need to read it, anyway. I cannot say where she came across it, but I do know it was written by a man named Jeff Bickart in the months before he died of melanoma at the too-early age of forty-eight. Along with the passing of my friend, it tells me something about how I wish to conclude the story of my life on this piece of land. And for that reason, it also tells me something about how I want to live.
The End
There is no where from here for me.
Our children may choose other things,
this land pass into other hands.
I will be here on the hillside,
lying in a shallow grave,
covered by the native stones,
gone to rest in native ground;
mossy rocks, a gentle mound,
bones sweetening the acid soil.
ASK THE COWS
Once again we awoke to the sound of rain slapping the metal roof over our heads. There are many things a tin roof is good for—shedding snow, thriftiness and ease of installation, longevity—but none compare to its excellence in transmitting the sound of raindrops upon contact.
The rain has been incessant. Everywhere you go, first-cut hay remains standing. Perhaps not all of it, but plenty enough, growing taller and stemmier and less palatable by the minute. It’s a full month past when most farmers prefer to be finished with first-cut, in part because the nutritional content is vastly superior before so much precious plant energy is expended in the seed head, but also because there’s a fairly simple rule of haying, which says that you can’t take second-cut until you’ve taken first-cut, and you darn well can’t take third until you’ve taken second. In other words, it’s not only that the first cutting will be of reduced quality, it’s that there will be less time for second and third cuts to rise from the soil.
We return from chores, soaked at both ends: our heads and shoulders by the rain that is falling, and our feet and lower legs by the rain that has fallen and now clings to the pasture grass that is growing by inches per day. Everything is lush and verdant, almost overwhelmingly alive. Our boots are permanently waterlogged, our feet wrinkled and clammy.
The boys are unfazed by the constant deluge. Indeed, they seem to hardly notice it, and not for the first time I wonder to what extent our children’s reactions are learned, rather than innate. Is it possible that the only difference between a child who plays in the rain and one who does not is that the latter has been taught to avoid the rain?
I have little patience for lament regarding forces over which we have no control, and the same could be said of the majority of the famers I know, whose very livelihood is dependent on such forces in ways that mine is not. I do not hear complaints from these men and women; commentary, sure, perhaps a sigh, a roll of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders. But not complaints. Complaining takes energy; it is a brittle and hollowing force, not unlike anger or judgment. It does nothing to advance the human intellect and spirit, and therefore it is best saved for moments that are truly worth inflicting these wounds upon ourselves.
All this rain has reminded us how fortunate we are to inhabit a piece of land that drains well. Despite the sodden state of things, the gardens are (mostly) looking hale and hearty, and the critters are their usual implacable selves; I’ve long thought that cows might be a better model for human behavior than the majority of our so-called leaders. They are accepting of whatever is offered them, and their default mood seems to be one of quiet contentment. Nip the grass, chew the cud, rest the bones, and all the while the generosity of milk, meat, and manure. Cows don’t start wars, or discriminate against cows of different color or predilections. Cows don’t aspire to create legacies, or to leave any evidence of their passing beyond clipped tufts of grass and steaming piles of manure.
Soon enough, it’ll stop raining. Soon enough, I suspect, everyone’ll be talking about how dry it is, about how we sure could use a day or two of rain or we’re not even going to get a third cut of hay at all. And the cows? They’ll be gathered under the same fence-line maples they gathered under back when it wouldn’t stop raining, still nipping the grass, still chewing the cud, still resting the bones. Because that’s the great thing about trees: rain, sun, snow, whatever—they’ll shelter you no matter what.
7
The Downside of Convenience
IN THE EARLY YEARS of Fin’s and Rye’s unschooling, Penny and I struggled to determine to what extent organized, away-from-home activities should fit into their learning. This struggle originated at least in part from our own childhood experiences. Penny in particular had been immersed in team sports from an early age. She was a player of such devotion that she often played on two sports teams concurrently, even while recovering from one of the multiple knee surgeries she underwent. Of course, this meant that the majority of her hours not dedicated to school were instead given to field, court, and physical therapy.
Since I was overweight and generally disinclined to demonstrate my lack of skill and agility any more than absolutely necessary, team sports did not play much of a role in my childhood. I have a vague memory of playing on my grade school’s basketball team, and I recall that on a few occasions, when our team was already so far ahead or behind that nothing I might do on the court could in any meaningful way influence the outcome, I was allowed a few minutes of action. But despite the dearth of my participation in team sports, I saw how the majority of my classmates were in one way or another immersed in the culture of extracurriculars, and I came to understand this as the norm. It wasn’t merely sports, of course. There was theater, music, dance, debate club, horseback riding, Scouting, and probably many others I wasn’t even aware of. Naturally, the list has only expanded over the years, and the advent of the Internet has created an entirely new genre of virtual groups and clubs.
Like so many of our choices surrounding the boys’ education, this culture was at odds with our innate sense of what felt right for us. As the boys grew to the age when organized activities became an assumed part of their lives, the disparity between the force of this assumption and our desire to avoid becoming swept up in the inevitable busyness these activities required became a source of conflict for us.
“Should we be doing more?” Penny asked me one evening. “Do we need to provide them with other experiences?” The issue had come to a head after Fin expressed an interest in Little League baseball; the boy has always had a knack for accuracy, demonstrated first by his abilities with the bow and arrow and second by his talents with a baseball. He throws straight, hard, and true, stinging my palm with every pitch, and although he’s been exposed to few team sports, we pass the local ball field frequently. There, he saw the teams gathered each spring, either in practice or in competition, and his curiosity was evident in the way he pressed his forehead against the window as we rolled by.
In principle, Penny and I had nothing against him joining Little League; one year we even went so far as to pay the seasonal fee, and Fin spent his spare hours pummeling hay bales with a baseball in anticipation. Ultimately, not enough kids in our small town signed up to field a t
eam, for which Penny and I were mildly relieved. We’d written that check with no small amount of trepidation, because we’d witnessed how organized sports and other activities had profoundly disrupted families we knew, many of whom educated their children at home. In fact, it seemed to us as if the homeschooling families we knew were even busier than those families whose children attended school, perhaps out of a sense of needing to compensate for the lack of “opportunities” their kids weren’t getting in the classroom.
Our quiet observations regarding the impact of extracurricular activities on these families slowly resolved our conflict. It seemed to us that nearly everyone we knew was always running to one event or another, rushing through dinner to get to a practice or lesson, or even eating in the car. Weekends were often devoted to recitals, or games. “How are you doing?” we’d ask when we ran into friends in town. “Oh, busy, busy. It’s just crazy,” was the common reply.
Fin and Rye were not shut-ins. Already, both took music lessons, Fin attended a weekly daylong wilderness-skills program, and every Monday, Rye spent the morning with his mentor, Erik. But in comparison to the majority of their friends, our sons’ schedules were uniquely relaxed. They might as well have been on permanent vacation.
Interestingly, the boys have rarely asked for more activities. Even our close call with Little League was more a result of Penny’s and my early uncertainty than a direct request from Fin. The following spring, he inquired after Little League again, but by that point Penny and I were more secure in our sense of what was right for our family. Still, we did not deny him, and instead explained what joining Little League would mean, how it would take time away from all the other things he loved. There would be less time to shoot his bow, to hunt squirrels, and to play with his brother and his friends. To our admittedly great relief, he decided against baseball.
