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Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming

Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,

A seed pushing itself beyond itself,

The mole making its way through darkest ground. …

Theodore Roethke, “The Manifestation”

Ten yards up the hill in the next row of apple trees, seventy-four-year-old Garnet Dawson swung his scythe through the tall orchard grass in the August heat. Drenched with sweat, Frank hacked at the grass with a wide, lunging swing and then paused to watch. Garnet was forty years older than he almost to the day; the old man could not possibly be human. Beneath the shade of his John Deere cap, Garnet’s lined face was as dry as deadwood in a drought. His overalls tied at his ankles against snakes and yellow jackets, he advanced swiftly down the row, his long blade slicing the grass in short, effortless strokes.

Try as Frank might to emulate Garnet’s stroke, the longtime foreman of Levering Orchard would usually finish his row first and, rarely changing expression, come back to help in Frank’s. Then they’d meet, often pausing to sharpen their blades with whetstones, and move on, day after day, week after week, down the endless rows where the tractor mower couldn’t reach.

When Frank came in for the day at four-thirty after nine hours in the field, much as he had promised himself to settle into his office and start a novel, he usually sank down on the couch in exhaustion. Not writing much was bad enough. Even worse was a gnawing feeling that he had taken a giant step down—that somehow he had failed. Committing himself to a permanent regimen of orchard work, Frank realized, was not the same as breezing in from California to help at harvesttime. Was swinging a scythe or digging around young trees with a hoe to be the measure of his worth? While Wanda was awakening to her new environs and anticipating the October publication of her first book, Frank felt the boundaries of his childhood world beginning to close in on him.

Though he had voluntarily traded wingtips for work boots, asphalt for black soil, the mind does not so easily substitute new patterns of thinking for old ones. There was keen envy when a close friend in Los Angeles called to announce his new job as a film executive at Disney. There were Frank’s older siblings, among them three Ph.D.’s with academic careers, whose visits never failed to evoke his parents’ pride and approval. During the June pick-your-own season, there was the ironic chorus of dedicated cherry customers who seemed to regard him as something of a curiosity and asked, “Aren’t you the one who went out to Hollywood?” Then, as Frank shouldered their twenty-two-foot ladders, they added in disbelief, “You mean you came back here to do this?

Success was proving hard for him to conjure in a neatly mowed orchard or a bucketful of dark sweet cherries. Frank often found himself silently repeating his comforting litany of acceptable achievements: the movie that hit the screen, the producers with whom he’d worked. What tugged at him was a sense that he’d pulled out too soon, without fulfilling his early promise of writing films that made a difference. Sometimes he wondered if this transplant back to Virginia was really going to take.

Wanda quickly relished much of her new life in Carroll County: settling into a home of her own after years of apartment living; cavorting with her long-lost cat, Cholla, a white-bibbed, white-socked wonder who had been evicted from the L.A. apartment and had lived during the interim at Wanda’s mother’s house in Maine. Wanda enjoyed physical safety in the country, a vegetable garden, and friendly neighbors.

Close as she felt to her in-laws, much as they’d welcomed her into the fold, she was still the daughter-in-law, the outsider with secular leanings and a foreign-sounding last name, moving onto their turf. There were enough differences to suspect problems might arise. Where Frank’s family regarded marriage as a sacred institution, Wanda, a child of divorce, tended to see it as a more fluid arrangement. Where his parents were regular churchgoers, she’d dropped out in her teens.

Another long-standing issue nagged at her every day: the fear of losing control—control of her identity, her career, and her financial destiny. The specter of male chauvinism had cast its pall over Wanda all her life, the idea imparted by her mother that all men in some insidious way come to dominate their women, that even low-key Frank was capable of such behavior. And wouldn’t living, quite literally, in his childhood home surrounded by the guideposts of his youth provide the ideal setting for the sublimation of her identity into his?

Although it was true that Marie Urbanski was something of a fanatic on the subject of feminism, Wanda had seen enough of the world to concur on many of her major points. Wanda had seen female friends wilt in marriage while their husbands thrived. She knew a legion of bright, talented women who had waged lifelong, uphill battles for confidence and esteem. She worried about the effect of violence against women and their objectification on television and in the movies. Sexism remained a live issue for Wanda, something she would have to be vigilant of here in the South.

Without exception, all her L.A. friends were feminists, but in Carroll County, even in the home cove, Wanda’s quiet brand of feminism went wanting for supporters. Neither Miriam Levering nor Sam’s cousin Virginia Price was attracted to women’s rights. What was most galling to Wanda about their antipathy was that as politically liberal “cause” people, they readily signed on to other progressive movements. But they did not or could not see the vital connection between the status of women and the great social issues. Not only among older women in the family, but in the community, as a married woman who’d retained her birth name, Wanda was an anomaly. (Actually her birth name was Urbanski, but after a 1977 visit to Poland, Wanda adopted the Polish feminine for her name, Urbanska.)

Wanda’s fears of losing the reins of her life were compounded by an aversion to poverty. As a teenager her family had lived in a drafty, poorly insulated duplex, and her mother drove a low-slung, low-rent car that was ugly even when new. Back then she had vowed never to let herself get into her mother’s fix. Marie had lived hand to mouth all her adult life, especially during those years when she was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky and later on before she became tenured at the University of Maine. Marie was sixty before she could scrape together a down payment on her first house. Without a financial cushion of her own, Wanda feared she would never have nice things or enjoy the kind of security that had so eluded her mother.

Scrutinizing her husband’s parents, Wanda saw that lack of money was an accepted, even perversely cherished, tenet of the Levering life-style. It crossed Wanda’s mind more than once those first months at the orchard that she was likely to sink into the straitened circumstances to which Sam and Miriam had grown accustomed. And now that he was back near his parents, what about Frank? Wasn’t there a danger that her husband would lapse again into the indifference to money and material things that he’d expressed when she’d first met him as a divinity student who slept in his car?

Wanda couldn’t be sure. Living in the house where he’d grown up, Frank could hardly be expected to perceive their new residence as she did. For him, the place—with all its deficiencies—was, after all, home. For Wanda, it seemed that unless enough income could be generated for major renovations, the walls would begin to close in on her. She could only wince in agreement when Frank’s cousin’s wife bluntly described the kitchen as “depressing” and Wanda’s sister, after her first visit from California, pronounced the upstairs bathroom with its sloped ceilings “oppressive.” Tactless though they were, for Wanda these words hit the nail on the head. And much as she wanted to rise above old demons, much as she had welcomed a change from the L.A. rat race, she was unwilling to take a vow of poverty that would send her back to the most vulnerable period in her life.

There is a photograph of us from the first summer that now seems a sort of idyll. A friend who flew in to visit from Los Angeles took it—a woman who had never before set foot on a farm. Work-hardened, Frank looks lean and muscular in blue jeans and a T-shirt; Wanda looks slender in a light cotton dress, her long blond hair set off by a tan. Barefoot, we stand arm in arm in the shade of the dark green cherry tree behind our house. We smile at the camera with what might pass to a stranger as deep contentment. To that stranger it might well appear that we had lived in this tranquil setting all our lives.

It’s an appealing image—the kind that, if memory ever fails, might stand for the truth. But memory hasn’t failed, not yet. Leaving Los Angeles did not in itself make life more satisfying. Change, we were discovering that summer, was not happening to us the way it happens to characters in a bad movie. Real change does not happen merely by cutting to a new location. It happens gradually, in fits and starts, in an internal tug-of-war between the deep-rooted claims of the old self and the yearnings to reach for something better.

What we knew in theory was not yet manifest in our lives. In theory we understood that success is not your profession or how many achievements you pile up, how much money you bank, or the security that money and things seem to provide. In theory success and security are intangibles, not your standard of living, but your standard of life; not the way others see you, but the way you see yourself.

In practice we had a long, steep climb up the side of our mountain, into pathless woods, across ravines choked with briars and rocky cliffs near the top, to make those brave words real in our lives. We had chosen to climb the mountain. But the struggle to set standards of our own, to arrive where we wanted to be, was only beginning.

During our many travels subsequent to moving to Levering Orchard, we assumed a kind of mission: to meet others who were hashing out these same issues, climbing similar mountains, trying to make considered decisions about their lives. Three trips—one cross-country through Mississippi and Louisiana to California and back home through Missouri; a second to New York, Maine, and Vermont; a third to Georgia—were taken primarily to explore other people’s thinking, with fun, relaxation, and friendship thrown in on the side.

Many of the lives we touched resonated with ours. Often we found that the issues with which people were struggling or with which they’d found clarity paralleled our own. Always we felt reinforced, as the Quakers would say, “held up into the light,” by seeing the numbers of individuals who were thinking along our lines, who were bucking the blandishments of fast living and consumerism and defining their own wants, needs, and lives.

We discovered during the course of our travels that some people don’t have the luxury of options in making the changes necessary for a more satisfying life; a Hobson’s choice is forced upon them. Maybe a husband wants out of the marriage, or a wife issues an ultimatum. Maybe the company they own goes belly up. Or they’re laid off from their jobs, or fired. Or maybe, as with a tall, striking woman in New York City, they simply can’t go on anymore. So they do what Kathy Kent did: they fire their lives, hoping that “new” will mean “better.”

On a bitterly cold winter afternoon, Kathy sat across from us drinking herbal tea at the Health Pub in Manhattan, a pastel oasis for those who eat and drink without sin. With her soft-spoken Texas accent, her flowing red hair, and her green eyes, it was difficult to picture this thirty-five-year-old woman in her Wall Street incarnation: working at the Commodities Exchange as an options manager for a brokerage firm and, later, for Shearson Lehman Brothers in retail brokerage.

Then she told us about her father.

“My father was raised during the Depression, and he was terribly poor,” Kathy said. “For my father, happiness is financial security.”

As Kathy grew up in Fort Worth, the oldest of three children, her father certainly must have been happy by his own definition. A workaholic executive in hotel and restaurant management, he was doing very well financially. That he had suffered the first of three heart attacks during Kathy’s adolescence did not deter him from his course.

“My father’s expectation for me was to be a success in business,” Kathy said. “So that was extremely important to me.”

In 1980, after waiting tables in New York and landing a few bit parts as an actress, she turned in earnest to the role her father had scripted for her. She went to work on Wall Street, working her way up from her first job as secretary to the chairman of the Commodities Exchange. “A lot of people,” Kathy observed, “go through life living up to other people’s expectations.” She was one of that legion—or had been.

And so had we. We felt a pang of recognition at the characterization, both having traveled that route at one time or another. We both had parents who were only too willing to impart their philosophies to us and, if we let them, anoint us as disciples.

From early on, despite Marie’s feminist politics and her scholarly interest in Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, she made no bones about her desire for Wanda to advance herself—through marrying well or pursuing a fast-track career or, even better, both. Her younger daughter was a special person and, therefore, entitled to all the finer things in life. In her adolescent years Wanda was convinced that this was what she wanted, too. Paradoxically, though Marie had followed her own drummer in an era in which it wasn’t fashionable for women to do so, when Wanda decided in the summer of 1980 to leave New York City and put in with Frank Levering—who had announced he had $127 to his name and no work—her mother’s disapproval might as well have been broadcast on the network news.

For Sam Levering, what his son should do in life was simple. Frank should follow in his footsteps: major in horticulture at Cornell and become an orchardist and leader among Quakers, devoting a large share of his time to public service. Frank had almost come to blows with Sam while still in high school over the Cornell issue, and he continued to separate himself from his father in his decision to become a writer and go to Hollywood. For Wanda, shedding the cloak of her mother’s expectations came later, in her twenties, and not without tremendous pain and anguish. Was freeing oneself from the grip of these expectations an essential of simplifying one’s life?

By 1986 Kathy’s achievements had more than fulfilled her father’s expectations. While her husband, a songwriter, was tasting the famine side of the feast-or-famine axis of his calling, Kathy was pulling down $60,000 a year plus bonuses. “I had financial stability. And you get accustomed to a certain life-style—a certain car, clothes, trips to Europe. I took it for granted.”

But as her father had before her, Kathy was buying her life-style at a bitter price. The relentless pressure and pace of being a floor operations manager was threatening her health. “I was burning out,” she said. “I was feeling sick all the time, losing weight. I got so I couldn’t sleep at night. I started having migraines. There wasn’t really any relief. You’d get a little time away on weekends, then by three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I’d start feeling anxious. By Sunday night I’d be throwing up in the bathroom. But,” Kathy went on, “I still wasn’t thinking about my future too much, because I felt trapped; I felt helpless to effect a change.”

In December of 1986, having moved to an even higher-pressure job at Shearson Lehman, Kathy could no longer ignore the migraines that had increased in both frequency and intensity. The pain was most acute at the back of her head. Maybe she had a brain tumor, she worried. So she went to a neurologist, who put her through a pricey battery of tests. The neurologist’s diagnosis: “Occipital neuralgia,” Kathy said. “Head pain. I paid fourteen hundred dollars for this guy to tell me I had a pain in the back of my head.”

The neurologist did have a possible remedy. A “procaine-type substance” could be injected at the base of her skull to deaden the nerves in the back of her head. One of the side effects of such a procedure, the neurologist warned, could be the deadening of nerves in Kathy’s face.

That was a risk she refused to take. Kathy stayed with her job, enduring her pain. Then, in the spring of 1987, a friend told her about “this holistic guy.” It wasn’t easy to make the appointment. “All this new age stuff,’ Kathy said, “I thought it was total horseshit.”

Figuring nothing would come of it, Kathy sat facing the man in his office. “Do you think you can heal yourself?” he asked. Kathy wasn’t sure. “I can help you help yourself,” he went on, “but you’re going to have to take responsibility for your life. If you do that, I promise you your headaches will go away.”

Though the new age approach sounded more sensible than she expected, Kathy remained skeptical. Then he got to the crux of the matter: “To what do you attribute your headaches?”

“My job,” Kathy replied.

“That’s simple. Change jobs.”

“I can’t do that,” Kathy said.

The man looked at her. Then he gave her books to read on meditation, advice on how to change her diet. And a poem.

“It was about standing at the edge of a cliff and believing that when you jump, you’ll fly,” Kathy said.

Three months later, Kathy jumped.

“In a dark time,” Roethke writes, “the eye begins to see.” The year 1965 was a dark time for Millard and Linda Fuller, cofounders of Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating substandard housing worldwide with volunteer labor.

One morning in early spring, we drove through one-stoplight towns with grand old homes and tumbledown shacks, past miles of peach orchards in lush pink bloom, into Americus, Georgia, a modest city just eight miles east of Plains, home of Habitat’s most famous volunteers, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. A few blocks from Habitat’s international headquarters, we parked the Malibu next to a crumbling sidewalk shot through with grass. In front of us, boards dangled loose on an old frame house; the front porch roof sagged on rotting pillars. Untrimmed bushes and vines choked the porch of the house next door.

The Fullers live across the street. In 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama, an architect was drawing up blueprints for a mansion, to be built on their new twenty-acre lot, complete with swimming pool and horse stables. The Fullers got swept up in a marital crisis, and that house was never built. Since 1977 the Fullers have lived in the tan, two-story frame house on Church Street for which they paid $12,500. With the last of their four children recently departed for college, the pair now live here alone.

As Linda and Millard talked about their lives, we sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee. The bars on the kitchen window had been installed, Millard explained, motioning behind him, after some guys broke in and scared their daughters.

When their marriage was shaken, Linda explained, speaking in slow, fervent tones, she was a homemaker in her early twenties with two young children and a husband who gave her whatever money could buy. The one thing that money could not buy—the thing she most desired—was time with twenty-nine-year-old Millard, who worked round the clock seven days a week amassing their fortune. The son of the owner of a small country store, Millard was a modern-day Horatio Alger, a lawyer and entrepreneur from Lanett, Alabama, who financed his college and law school educations by selling birthday cakes and printing desk blotters and campus telephone directories.

By 1965 the Fullers were millionaires, owning—in addition to their thirteen-room house and shares in various business interests, including a major cookbook publishing concern—a vacation retreat, two speedboats, and a Lincoln Continental. And Millard wasn’t stopping there. His next goal was ten million.

It was the life Linda had thought she wanted. Her father, who owned an electrical appliance store, had never provided “any of the real luxuries in life. When I was growing up,” remembered the tall Tuscaloosa, Alabama, native, “it seemed like my friends had prettier dresses than I did. I wanted more clothes and a bigger house.”

Wanda nodded empathetically. She had harbored similar feelings while attending fifth through ninth grades on scholarship in private schools in Lexington, Kentucky. She was a clotheshorse back then, pumping every bit of babysitting money into her wardrobe; as for her mother’s apartment it was such an embarrassment for years she refused to have friends over. Even Frank knew whereof Linda spoke. Though he’d attended public high school in Mount Airy, he’d often felt the inadequacy of his farmboy wardrobe.

When seventeen-year-old Linda first met Millard, the young law student at the University of Alabama seemed the answer to prayer. She loved him first, she said, laughing, “because he was tall. But I could see that he was going to be a lawyer and that would probably mean a lot of money, so I felt very good about getting hitched.”

Linda married Millard the summer she graduated from high school. But as the years went on in Montgomery, Millard’s colossal success began to take an unexpected toll. “I remember sometimes in the evenings,” she said, “after I put the kids to bed, just how lonely I felt. Abandoned, you know?”

To feel better, Linda said, “any spare moment I had, I went shopping.” She had bought so many dresses and her favorites—shoes—that they swarmed out of her huge closet and were colonizing Millard’s. But Linda found that the thrill of acquisition could not fill the vacuum of her absentee husband indefinitely. “I reached the point where, even though I enjoyed wearing something when it was new, I realized I didn’t have the companionship that I wanted from my husband.”

Ironically, it was the plan for Linda’s “dream house” that brought her feelings to light. “The more I thought about my life in that new house,” she said, “the more I saw that house as a prison.

“Here was Millard knocking himself out to make all this money,” she said, her voice down-shifting with emotion, “and it wasn’t really making me happy anyway. One or two times I just went to him and I said, ‘We don’t have much of a relationship. I feel like I don’t love you anymore.’ And that kind of shocked him. And he would promise me that we would spend more time together. Then after a week or two, he’d be back in the same old routine, working all the time. I came to the realization that I was miserable, and it wasn’t going to get any better. So one night I told him, ‘I’m just going to have to leave and think for a while. Because I don’t know what to do.’”

Though she was looking back a quarter century, tears shone in Linda’s blue eyes. We were astonished that someone so much in the public eye would allow herself to become so vulnerable—that she hadn’t swathed herself in a public persona to protect her from such outbursts of emotion.

Linda wasn’t bluffing. The next day she departed for New York City, where she sought the counsel of a minister friend. She confided to him that she was considering divorce. After several sessions the minister said, “ ‘You’re got to decide; I can’t tell you what you’re going to do,’ ” she recalled. “But the one thing that really gave me clear vision was when he said, ‘If you’ve ever loved Millard, you can love him again.’ ”

A week had passed. “I called Millard to come up,” Linda said. Millard jumped at the chance. His days had been hellish. With his support system gone and his future in limbo, he had been unable to concentrate at work. And a feeling of weight on his chest that made breathing difficult, along with chronic neck pain, had become even more pronounced.

In the foyer at Radio City Music Hall, the couple sat down together for a serious talk. Starting was hard. Linda began to sob. Arm in arm, they hit the streets of Manhattan. Linda wanted major change, but not, she hoped, divorce. Her discontent had stirred feelings deep inside Millard, loosing ambitions that had long lain fallow. He made a stunning proposal, an idea that had begun to brew during the days of Linda’s absence.

Millard Fuller made a striking first impression. At six feet four, gaunt as a fencepost with craggy features and long arms and hands, he could be described as Lincolnesque (though he lacked the famed beard). Peering intently through wire-rimmed glasses at the two strangers in his kitchen, he would tip back and forth on his chair, hunch his shoulders under the red cardigan sweater, and twist his body this way and that as he listened or talked. He would pace to the barred window and back as his hands performed tricks in the air with invisible string, burning a seemingly bottomless supply of kinetic energy. This was the master salesman and leader of a large and growing organization, selling not cookbooks, but the theology of the hammer.

Millard remembered his wife’s departure as a major watershed in his life. “It was a deeply spiritual experience because I realized that there is no security in material things—that you have the illusion of security but that’s not where real security lies.”

That pivotal night on the town, Millard proposed to Linda that they sell their business, give away the proceeds, and start their life anew. No one could accuse the Fullers of timidity. Within a few months they’d sold their business interest to Millard’s partner in Montgomery for roughly $950,000. They’d kissed the houses, the boats, the Lincoln Continental, goodbye. When all these assets were sold, Millard and Linda gave away well over a million dollars to churches, colleges, and charities, reserving only $25,000 for themselves.

“It was a very freeing thing,” Millard said. “But a lot of people thought that we needed psychological counseling. Something must be wrong with you if you want to give away your wealth.”

“A lot of our old friends thought we went off the deep end,” Linda said. “A lot of our family did, too.”

The grand adventure, as Millard called it, had begun.

That adventure would make a rich biography: how the Fullers piled their two young children into the car and took a long family trip to Florida; how, on the way back north, they stopped for a few hours to see a friend at Koinonia Farm, outside Americus; how, influenced by Clarence Jordan, Koinonia’s leader, they ended up staying a month; how, after moving into an apartment over a gas station in New Jersey and working in New York as a fund-raiser for a black college in Mississippi, Millard returned with his family to live at Koinonia; how, working with Jordan, the Fullers started Koinonia Partnership Housing funded by Fund for Humanity, a precursor to Habitat; and how, in 1976, the Fullers founded the organization that now has, Millard estimates, one hundred thousand regular volunteers in the United States alone.

“We’ve found real treasure,” Millard said. “Not in a big bank account, but in a wonderful relationship and a meaningful life. We finally started making some investments in the right places.”

The Fullers’ decision to divest themselves of the trappings of their lives and whittle them down to their essence sprang out of their commitment to a strong Christian faith. “A man’s life,” Jesus says in the Gospel According to Luke, “consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Throughout the gospels, Jesus stresses the virtue not of wealth but of unconditional love and compassion for all human beings. At Koinonia Farm, in a tightly knit, racially integrated Christian community, the Fullers had earned little income, spent little money on themselves while doing the daily work of the farm. Seeing poverty and suffering in the wider community around them, they had caught a vision of service to others, based on the life and teaching of Jesus.

Although we had no definitive biblical text as our guide, listening to the certainty the Fullers expressed lent us confidence in our course. As they talked about their work, our confidence deepened that from many different points on the compass, the same destination could be reached.

As president of Habitat for Humanity International, Millard draws an annual salary of $38,000. Performing a variety of tasks in an office at headquarters adjacent to her husband’s, Linda makes $14,000. (With no apparent mindfulness of the wage discrepancy, Linda says her role is as Millard’s “helpmate.”) Millard some years pulls in $10,000 to $12,000 as a part-time attorney. All speaking fees—Millard noted that he was recently paid $10,000 for a speech in Rochester, New York—are donated to Habitat.

“We’re just trying to make enough money to meet expenses,” Linda said. “When we get all our kids through school, we’ll probably cut our salaries down.”

“Do you have any savings?” Wanda asked.

“We don’t have any savings account,” Millard said. “Zip.”

“You feel that you could make more money if you needed it?” Wanda persisted. Somehow the idea of living without a financial cushion disturbed her.

“Making money,” said Millard with a laugh, “has never been a problem.”

That afternoon the Fullers were expecting a visit from a young Vermont couple whose business was on the brink of bankruptcy, Millard said. “They’re coming at simplifying their life-style out of necessity. Lots of times people coming at it that way discover the joy of simple living. But it is terrifying to most people.”

“They don’t realize,” said Linda, “how wonderful it is.”

Kathy Kent walked into the boss’s office at Shearson Lehman. She was leaving the company.

“Oh?” he said. “Are you pregnant?”

“No.”

“What brokerage firm are you going to?”

Kathy wasn’t going to another brokerage firm. She was enrolling at the Swedish Institute of Massage Therapy on West Twenty-sixth Street. She was going into holistic medicine.

The boss’s mouth fell open. “He thought it was a great joke.”

It was no joke. Kathy had taken to heart the poem about leaping off the cliff. Three months after she’d read it, here she was, falling. Learning how to fly.

Following her mentor’s advice, Kathy had started meditating. Her migraines were a thing of the past. She had, she said, taken full responsibility for her own health.

“It was part of a process of listening to yourself. I decided that you have to do what you want to do. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be very unhappy.”

Kathy’s father was not pleased. “When I told my father I was going to be a massage therapist,” she said, “he gave me the same look my boss gave me. But that’s the way it is. I had to stop talking to myself in the voice of my parents.”

These days a certified massage therapist with a booming private practice, Kathy savors some delicious ironies. Her old boss called her to get her recommendation for an acupuncturist. And her mother, who recently moved with Kathy’s father to Baltimore, is now herself studying to be a massage therapist. “We talk shop,” Kathy said, grinning. “My father thinks she’s out of her mind.”

Kathy’s triumph was not always assured. “When I first told my husband what I wanted to do,” she said, “I said, ‘You’re going to have to carry the ball for a while.’ He was really scared. You run a lot of risks doing what you want to do. Not only economically, but emotionally. But it forced Jeff to go out on a limb. My changing my life brought him to a higher place.”

Jeff’s songwriting career has taken off. Bette Midler and Cyndi Lauper have recorded his songs. Among other things, Kathy said, he’s been able to break into the lucrative advertising market, composing music for commercials.

“He’s been very supportive,” Kathy said. A number of Kathy’s regular clients have come, courtesy of Jeff, from the music industry. “He’s great PR,” she said, laughing. “He hands out my cards and says to the guy, ‘You know, Bill, I think you look a little stressed. You ought to see my wife.’ ”

Not long after Kathy broke the news to her boss at Shearson Lehman, she and Jeff threw what she described as a “party.” “We had a glass of champagne. Then I started ripping up all my panty hose. It felt very liberating. I decided I wasn’t going to keep anything that I didn’t want. Nothing. I got all my Brooks Brothers suits together and gave them all to Goodwill. I thought, Some bag lady’s going to see all those Brooks Brothers suits and go, ‘Fantastic!’ ”

Unlike Kathy Kent or Linda and Millard Fuller, we faced no dark crisis that precipitated our move to Virginia. Once we arrived, change came slowly, not driven by disaster. That first year, 1986, the orchard did not set off the bank’s alarm; it made a modest profit. Wanda found work as a free-lancer. As long as she was willing to travel on assignment and do telephone interviews, Virginia was proving to be as good a base for her as California (with living expenses down and distractions reduced, maybe better).

Like most people we’ve talked to who have restructured their lives, Wanda had no sudden revelations. What she had was time, the kind of time she hadn’t had since college. And as she’d done at Harvard, Wanda started keeping a journal, extensive entries that forced her to look at how she spent her days. No longer merely caught up in the flow of events, Wanda began—for the first time in her life—to shape events from her own point of view. It was her life, and she was starting to feel in control of it. In the process, ironically, she was starting to let go of old fears.

Wanda had written a book profiling a generation of young Americans, yet as the summer turned to fall and winter, her own voice had never been stronger. This life here was going to work. Frank’s parents seemed thrilled to have her close by. It touched her when Sam brought in gifts of wildflowers or ripe fruit, a father-in-laws way of expressing affection. Miriam took a lively interest in Wanda’s work and activities, and they frequently ran errands together in town. With her talents as a seamstress, cousin Virginia loved nothing more than to whip up a new blouse or dress any time Wanda needed one. Frank’s family’s delight in Wanda was almost too good to be true. Could this be the secure, loving family Wanda longed for as a child?

Wanda’s disappointment in her new family’s lack of feminist perspective was gradually replaced by the understanding that you don’t always have to see things eye to eye to love, be loved, or even be close. Miriam, Sam, and Virginia had other things to teach her, other fruit to offer. As she observed the senior Leverings’ marriage, she noted that a balance of power had been struck, that although Miriam was no feminist, she was strong, firm, and clear in where she stood. She was nobody’s chump. Sam seemed to adore his wife, even if she crossed him.

As Wanda’s posture relaxed, as she learned to relinquish the will to control life around her, she found that she was also poised—as the next few years would demonstrate—to improve relations with members of her own family.

Many friends mistakenly assumed that it was Frank, not Wanda, who had pushed the move to Virginia. In fact it was Wanda who’d first argued in Los Angeles that the moment had come to make a move, and Frank had agreed. So perhaps it should have been no surprise that it was Wanda who first felt at home at Levering Orchard.

For Frank, it was nice to make an impact, to help stop the orchard’s flow of red ink. But Frank’s Hollywood self—the quest for success—would not settle down. Like his stubborn father, proud of his tenacity, Frank was determined to stage a comeback. As soon as the apples were picked and sold, he started work on a new screenplay. The plan was to go out to Los Angeles, find a new agent, and try to sell it in the spring.

Because his prospects for a sale were iffy at best, and because she thought Frank’s quest unhealthy, Wanda watched unhappily as events unfolded. She was determined to remain detached but supportive, to try not to interfere with his quest or attempt to exert control over his life.

In April we drove the pickup to Los Angeles in three grueling days. While staying with friends, Frank launched a frenetic campaign to sell the script or—if not that—land a screenwriting job. Early breakfast meetings. Ten o’clock appointments. Lunches. Drinks. Dinners. Not exactly a born salesman, Frank forced himself to sell. He pitched new ideas to producers, talked up his script, pinballed from one rejection to another. The pace, the parade of people, drove him to exhaustion. After three and a half weeks, no agent would take him on, no one nibbled at the script, no one offered him a job. It was a bust. A complete failure.

Work was pressing at the orchard. Two nights before leaving L.A., Wanda’s friend Liz Brody asked Frank to stand in as her date at a famous director’s son’s bar mitzvah. Frank agreed. Besides, maybe he’d meet someone who could help him.

At the party afterward—with car-length, papier-mâché Top Gun model airplanes dangling from the ceiling and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of food and drink—he did. A young woman from Warsaw, married to a Polish film director, had been visiting Liz. The American Jew and the Polish Catholic had ties that predated them. Kasia Gintowt-Bajon’s family had harbored relatives of Liz’s close family friends from the Nazis during World War II. Kasia planned to return to Poland in due course. But, first, her dream was to see America—the Grand Canyon, Texas, whatever was out there between the two coasts. Could she make the trip with Frank?

Frank had wanted time alone, time to lick his wounds, time to take a hard look at his goals. But Kasia lacked transportation and money, and his heart went out to her. And Liz, who was eager for him to agree, assured him that she’d see to it that Kasia could cover half the gas money. The trip was fine with Wanda, who, with her book just published, had flown to Maine to address the annual meeting of state librarians.

Frank and Kasia hit the road. It was a strange journey. Kasia pinched pennies and seemed completely oblivious of Frank’s inner struggle. It was a pleasure for Frank to watch Kasia, who was a children’s book illustrator, gawk at the Grand Canyon and describe the Painted Desert or a plains thunderstorm with childlike excitement and a foreigner’s vocabulary. And once they arrived in Virginia, Kasia loved the orchard. She couldn’t get enough of it and wandered through the trees most of the day before catching a bus for Washington, D.C.

A foreigner seeing things with fresh eyes proved the right tonic for Frank: it enabled him to look at his own life in a new way. He had come to realize that L.A.’s pace no longer agreed with him. He felt frazzled, thrown into fast forward, like Minnesota’s freshman senator Paul Wellstone in his famous hyperkinetic campaign commercials. Frank was trying to fit himself, a square peg, into Hollywood, a round hole. Perhaps Hollywood was not him, never had been. Maybe he could find himself in Virginia. Maybe in Virginia new expectations could emerge, with the promise of new days.

Frank did not, however, forget Hollywood. Not entirely. But he put that script away in a closet and never wrote another scene.