It was July 4, 2016, and I’d signed up to bring three watermelons and two pies. Nate was down for setting up tents and “chicken hauling,” despite uncertainty over what the latter entailed. The parade started at 10 a.m., so at 9:45 I drove Stella the two miles from our house to the town center. I entrusted the pies and watermelons to the ladies’ auxiliary, who were assembling the chicken lunch in the kitchen of our town center building. As I walked across the sun-drenched street to the pastoral lawn of what serves as our town’s library, children’s activity center, store selling locally made goods, coffee shop, hostel, and home to such groups as the Civics Klatch, the Women’s Wellness Circle, and the Historical Society, I waved to Nate, who was setting up tents with a few of our neighbors.
I bought a shortcake from the library’s strawberry shortcake fund-raiser and settled in on the lawn with friends to watch the parade. Stella was soon swooped into the arms of one of our neighbors and I chatted with another mom I’d recently met. With a siren blast from our volunteer fire department’s truck, the parade was under way. All the kids in town led the parade riding bikes they’d decked that morning with ribbons, stickers, and balloons. There was also a contingent wearing what I assume were last year’s very patriotic Halloween costumes: an Abe Lincoln, a Lady Liberty, and a dinosaur wearing an American flag hat. Our local state rep and his wife drove in their truck and waved. The parade was all of five minutes long, but the cheers were riotous. Afterward, the kids re-collected the candy they’d thrown to the parade spectators (aka their parents and the other adults in town). Stella and I met up with Nate, who’d completed his tent-setting-up duty and was getting ready to chicken haul, which as it turned out meant toting chickens from the outdoor roaster inside to the kitchen for the luncheon. We’d lived in Vermont for barely two months and we already knew more people and had a more gratifying community life than we’d ever had in the city.
Back in Cambridge, and before that in DC and New York City, we’d been surrounded by people. Our neighbor’s house in Cambridge was a mere ten inches away from ours. The buses, the subways, and the sidewalks were glutted with humanity. But we hardly knew anyone. We had a set of friends we’d get together with periodically for dinner parties or game nights, but we didn’t have a true community. Our Vermont town of four hundred people, on the other hand, embodies that word. People here are self-sufficient, because you have to be to live this remotely. They chop their own wood, grow their own food, and raise their own livestock, but they’re also interdependent. They know no one can do it all alone so they lean on one another. Back in the city, I’d always say things to friends along the lines of, “You should stop by sometime” or “Let me know if you need help with anything,” but my words were empty and people rarely took me up on my offer. The first time I said something along those lines to a neighbor here in Vermont, they were in my garden the next morning helping me dig out flower bulbs to donate to the town’s plant, book, and bake sale fund-raiser.
I didn’t know I was missing—lacking, even—the warmth, the support, and the wisdom that a community offers until we moved to Vermont. The day after we moved in, as Nate and I scrambled to unpack, a woman appeared at our back door. After living in the often-contentious close quarters of cities for years, my first thought was that we’d already done something to offend the neighbors and that she was here to complain and/or inform us we were being sued. But this is not the city and that was not the case. Rather, she’d heard we’d moved in and had stopped by to give us several jars of homemade jam and to ask if we needed anything. Dumbstruck, we invited our new neighbor inside and chatted for an hour. This stereotypically rural behavior repeated itself as neighbor after neighbor dropped by unannounced to offer us a homemade foodstuff, assistance, and a keen interest in shooting the breeze. After each of our new friends departed, Nate and I would turn to each other and say, “This is why we moved here! This is what we wanted!” Connection, warmth, and community-minded spirit. I’m no longer surprised by the immense kindness of everyone I meet out here, but I’m touched every time.
About six months after moving in, one of my neighbors asked if she could come over to watch our daughter. I initially thought she was offering her services as a babysitter, which sounded good, but she quickly clarified that she didn’t want to be paid. Without putting it in so many words, she wanted to become Stella’s adopted grandmother. Our neighbor doesn’t have grandchildren of her own yet and she adores children. Seeing that Nate and I didn’t have any family living nearby, she intuited that we’d probably welcome the help, warmth, and ultimately the love that a grandparent provides. She now comes over one morning a week to watch Stella, and one evening a month to allow Nate and me to go out on a date.
This is a remarkable gift to us new parents, which is made all the more special because she’s not a blood relative and she doesn’t owe us this service. She doesn’t have to love our daughter, but she does. I know that arrangements like this exist in cities, in suburbs, and everywhere else, but for me, this type of deep connection didn’t happen before our Vermont life. Not many people live out here, so those that do tend to forge relationships that defy market forces and social norms. There’s documented research in behavioral economics that people don’t respond well to being paid for what they consider favors to friends, and I find that rings particularly true in our rural community. Not much money changes hands, but a great deal of work gets shared around, which is how Nate found himself helping to fix the well at the town community center one Tuesday. And how he finds himself serving on the boards of two different local nonprofit organizations. And why every gathering out here is a potluck, weddings included.
Another unique and fulfilling aspect of our rural life that I appreciate is the intergenerational relationships that form. When I lived in cities, I found that I always gravitated toward people who were almost exactly my age. Outside of work colleagues, I don’t think I had a single friend who didn’t fall within a few years of my birth date. Here in Vermont, however? I have friends ranging in age from nine to ninety. I never realized how much I was missing out on in my social life by having such a narrow age bracket of friends. I recently went to a double birthday party for two of my friends from church who were turning thirty and seventy, and it wasn’t until we were singing happy birthday and watching their heads bow over their candles—one gray with wisdom, one red with youth—that I understood the power of cross-generational friendships. For starters, these people know a lot of stuff! Nate and I joke that he should establish a weekly meeting with our sixty-year-old neighbor across the street because Nate ends up calling him every few days seeking his advice on some aspect of planting our vegetable garden, or what to do with ashes from our woodstove, or where to buy chainsaw parts. Learning from our older neighbors and enjoying the richness of their experiences is one of my favorite aspects of my new life.
What I didn’t understand before experiencing this level of all-encompassing, interdependent community is that our consumer culture has tried to do away with the essence of community. Coffee shops, restaurants, clothing stores, computer brands, and more have all co-opted our inherent human desire for community. For belonging. For a tribe. Our modern world has dismantled our previously tight-knit communities of family members and neighbors bound together by the necessities of remote, agrarian life. It’s now much more common to drive to work alone in our car every morning, work all day in front of a computer screen, return home after dark, spend a few hours with our immediate family, then repeat that pattern over and over again. That’s what Nate and I did for years. There’s no time to meet our neighbors, let alone help them spread mulch in their vegetable garden in exchange for tomatoes. We’re taught we can pay for everything we need. Our very lives can be purchased, and by extension, we can buy the rights to a fragmented community of like-minded consumers. Our unifying activity as a culture is shopping, and the one thing we all are is consumers. Consumption has become our spiritual outlet, our means of building relationships, of identifying ourselves by the brands emblazoned on our clothes, cars, shoes, laptops, and it has supplanted our interpersonal dependencies.
Here in rural Vermont, however, I’ve found a group of people who consciously disavow mainstream culture. There are no malls or movie theaters in our town. Instead, there are monthly town-wide potlucks; coffee hour (with homemade coffee and goodies) every Saturday morning at the library/local shop/community center; contra dances on the weekends; neighbors coming over to help with the maple syruping or the apple harvesting; town festivals and celebrations; a free summer camp for kids; the knowledge that you can stop by a neighbors’ house unannounced; the security that your kids are watched over by a wide net of people and that if they misbehave you’ll hear about it; and a sense that we do, in fact, need one another. Not everyone is best friends out here, but most people would help you out of a ditch in mud season without expecting anything in return. The culture harkens back to a Rockwellian Americana I’d assumed was dead; but it’s not, it’s just slightly altered since many of us out here make our living at least in part via the Internet.
Our first week on the homestead, I felt like I was still running the marathon of our previous four months. Since my in-laws generously came to help us move and were watching Stella, Nate and I blitzed through unpacking and had the whole house set up in two days. We stashed everything unnecessary in the basement because I’d decided that in this house—in this new practice of simple living—I wanted to unpack only the things we used on a daily basis. I didn’t want throw pillows on our bed anymore because all they did was waste my time and clutter up our space. I started to apply the principles of minimalism that guided my spending to the physical objects in my home. As soon as the last box was unpacked, Nate and I ran (I actually remember us jogging) outside to tackle the weeds in our bed of asparagus, planted by a previous owner and growing despite the jungle trying to choke the tender green stalks. We carried on like this for several weeks, corybantically jumping from one project to the next: repairing culverts, digging trenches, chopping firewood, weeding garden beds. Exhausted and overwhelmed by the scope of outdoor work that all seemed to need our attention right away, Nate and I realized we had to stop. We’d been on this treadmill of doing in order to get here and we needed to relish it. At a certain point, you have to stop striving and start living. You have to arrive.
One warm June evening after we put Stella to bed, I got out our Scrabble board, poured two glasses of wine, and went out on the back porch with Nate. As we played and chatted instead of working on the land, which we’d done every other night, we started to sink into gratitude. Into a recognition of how incredibly fortunate we were to achieve this unusual dream at such a young age and to have the rest of our lives to enjoy it. We weren’t going to get it all done that first year: the vegetable gardens we’d dreamed of, the firewood we needed to chop, the chickens we hoped to raise, the hiking trails we wanted to build through our woods, the apple cider we wanted to make, the bridge over the outlet to our pond that needed repairing (still does, come to think of it . . . ). It wasn’t all going to happen. And that was OK. Living on sixty-six acres means signing up to never be bored, to never have a dearth of projects, to never need to pay for entertainment, all of which we wanted. We had to ease into the realization that this life and this homestead was one of opportunity and one of balance, not a sprint of getting things done. As we talked this over, our mind-set shifted and we started to live with abundant gratitude instead of desperation over what was still undone. We started a routine of taking a hike together as a family every day, a practice we continued year-round, even in the depths of winter with snowshoes on our boots and Stella pulled behind us in a sled. Being in our woods transforms me every single time; after all, it’s why we came here in the first place. Without fail, I breathe more easily and am refreshed after time spent in nature. Joy is not a “done” to-do list; rather, it’s the ability to appreciate and savor the simplicity of each day’s routine. To not feel that you need a vacation from your life. To know that you’re living as close to your ideal as possible, every single day.
After coming to the realization that we were no longer beholden to the hectic modern mind-set of ticking down lists, Nate and I created a new rhythm of life. I’ve come to think of it as our own personal third way. For starters, we never set an alarm clock. We’re also not any one thing all the time—homesteaders, people who work on the Internet, parents—but we’re an amalgamation of these facets of our lives. We wanted diversity in our days, and now we have it. There is no handbook for what we do, this life that encompasses so many different niches, so we get to experiment, fail, succeed, and experiment again. What I’ve learned is that there are many other options for how a life can operate beyond the narrow, pigeonholed ruts our culture tries to force each of us into. Your goal is likely not to move to a homestead in the woods of Vermont (although, hey, maybe it is!), but what I’ve found is that most people want more out of life than simply slogging through it as a mindless consumer. Whatever your goal happens to be, managing your money wisely and taking charge of how you spend it is one of the first steps in allowing something new and different and wonderful to flourish in your life.
Nate and I used our money in unconventional ways for years; now, we applied those same lessons to how we used our time. Just as our consumer culture offers a full range of ways to spend our money, it also prescribes how we should use our time. We’re supposed to go to college, get jobs, get married, buy a house, have kids, and enroll in the idea that we’ll have to do this for the next forty years or more. That we’ll have to work to earn money to support a lifestyle we’re expected to have, because that’s what everyone else does. But it’s not the only way. It is so easy to accidentally let other people dictate your life; it happens to most of us without our even realizing it. We get slotted into predetermined roles based on societal expectations, something I did for years, without considering how we’d spend our time and money if we had the freedom to choose.
Nate and I also chart a third, nontraditional path in the way that we balance work and family: we both work and we both stay home with our daughter every day and have no paid childcare providers. We’ve blurred the lines between the standard dichotomy of stay-at-home parent versus working parent. We are both. This unusual arrangement is now feasible for some families given the Internet, the ability to work remotely, and the unconventionality inherent to entrepreneurship and modern marriages/partnerships. But it requires ruthless prioritization of how you use your time and your money: both must go only in service of what matters most to you. When our daughter goes down for a nap, no matter what else is happening that day, I sit down and write. I can be found writing with baby spit on my clothes and in my hair, with the washing machine singing its end-of-cycle song, and with dirty dishes stacked so high the faucet won’t turn on. But that is my ruthless prioritization, and that is what allows me to be home with my daughter and my husband while pursuing a career I’m passionate about. Now, on a practical level, let me be clear: it’s not possible for both parents to work full time every day, but a balance does exist. It’s unconventional, but then what in my life isn’t?
Nate and I choose to work for the intellectual fulfillment, not because we need the income, and I’m keenly aware of the privilege inherent to our situation. I’m also conscious that our frugality is elective, as opposed to mandatory, and that Nate and I are fortunate beyond belief to be in this position. Our conviction that we’re privileged is one of the motivators behind our decision to create a donor advised fund through which we contribute annually to charities. We feel an imperative to give back financially as well as through volunteer work in our community. While there are elements of our lifestyle that are purely choices of personal responsibility, the overarching trajectory we find ourselves on is heavily weighted by our upbringings, our educations, and our resulting earning power. Although we never made investment banker salaries, and in fact both worked for nonprofit/mission-based organizations, we made good money. And the more you earn, the more you can save and the quicker you can reach financial independence. That’s not to say that it can’t be done on lower salaries or with fewer built-in privileges, merely that the road was easier for Nate and me. Despite this, I don’t want you to feel discouraged if your circumstances are different from mine, because there are gains to be had anywhere along the spectrum of frugality. For some folks, paying down debt will provide that peace of mind; for others, it’s having a lifetime of savings invested in the market; for others, it’s the ability to pay cash for their children’s higher education. In whatever way you define financial security and peace, frugality is a tool that will get you there faster.
In addition to our balance between parenting and working, Nate and I both crave a balance between work that’s cerebral, done between our fingertips and a keyboard, and work that’s physical, done across wide swaths of our property. Achieving that synergy between physical and mental is perhaps my favorite aspect of life on our homestead. I write on my laptop, looking out the window at our apple orchard, until there are no more words. Then, depending on the season, I go outside and pull weeds from our vegetable garden or pick blackberries from the tsunami of bushes that grows wild and unchecked on the perimeter of our woods. Or I take Stella on a snowshoe hike through folded layers of whipped-cream snow. Nate, for his part, bangs away at ones and zeros (this, apparently, being what software engineers do) until he needs to move. And then I see him from the window, pruning our apple trees or in the woods with his chainsaw bringing down a tree for firewood, splitting it by hand with a maul, and stacking it in rows to dry for the winter. In the city, our lives were divorced from the natural world. It didn’t matter if it was snowing, or 95 degrees, or if blackberries were ripe somewhere; we were in offices all day long no matter what. Now, we base our days around seasonality. Each month, each day, even, blasts us with the minutiae of seasonal imperatives. The first few weeks of living here, we harvested rhubarb constantly as it was in the height of its growing season and I could not fathom what we’d do with so much rhubarb. But then, just as quickly, the plants turned inward and became dormant (being a neophyte gardener, I thought they were dead). Their time was done. My first lesson in the impermanence of a season. Having an intimate relationship with the natural world is a liberation from the technology, the pressures, the conformity, and the consumer-driven lifestyle of our modern age. Out here, it’s not about us, it’s about the seasons, the weather, the woods. We’re not in control and I love it. This new iteration of life is still evolving for us and will be for some time, I imagine. Our family is young, our homesteading knowledge is nascent, and we see a languid unfurling of maturation awaiting us in every sense. The unknowns of this future thrill me.