Living the Good Life

      Back in 1974 Rick and I bought a hay field in the hills of Vermont. Our son had just turned two.

      We decided to follow Scott and Helen Nearing’s lead after reading their book “Living the Good Life” and build a stone house. The permit was secured in July, which only gave us a few months to put a roof over our heads before cold weather settled in. We lived in a tent and several college friends arrived to help.

      I found a bevy of field stone on a farmer’s property, and he agreed we could take as much as we needed. So, every day I put my son in a Snugli on my back and drove to Farmer Norris’ field and hauled stone back to the building site. I managed to make 36 trips.

      The building of our home went very slowly. We received an FHA government loan for $16,000 at a half a percent and our monthly mortgage was $86 a month.

      By the time October rolled around all of our friends had left. We were alone and there wasn’t a roof. Eli had an earache, I was working full-time at the hospital, and it was getting cold.

      One morning we woke up to five inches of snow. I packed up my suitcase and put my son in the car and drove away to move in with a girlfriend. The next day Rick arrived asking if he could live with us, and he assured me he would have a roof on by Easter.

      Indeed, he did.

      We moved into our little stone house on Easter Sunday. There was a pipe in the basement that gave us cold water, plastic on the windows, no floor on the second story, no phone and a round oak wood stove providing heat—but it was our home, and it was only $86 a month.

      Over the next 50 years we added on to the house, always building in stone. We built a stone barn for our two morgan mares, and we landscaped with baby maples and oaks from the forest. We expanded our holdings to add another 20 acres, and our daughter and her family built a house on ten of those acres which we gifted to them as a wedding present.

      We recently created a family cemetery so that when our time arrives we will be laid to rest up the hill overlooking our life’s work and keeping an eye on things.