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11 ...................................... CONVERSION I found myself in a new incarnation, enthused with the unaccustomed life and enjoying most of its features. In a very real sense, I felt as if I had been born again. Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical 1 Three Re-creations of Home (1995) I sit at the kitchen table of a home located about fifteen miles from the Nearing homestead.1 I am surrounded by projects in motion. Children’s artwork is scattered at one end of the table. Dried herbs and flowers spill out from the kitchen into the dining room. Books are stacked in piles on and near shelves. One volume of a children’s encyclopedia, a staple of home schooling, lies open near the kitchen counter. Few walls separate one room from another in the first floor of the refurbished nineteenth-century house and, seemingly, few divisions among housework, homework, artwork, and play. Robin is in the kitchen cutting tomatoes , and Sally, her seven-year-old daughter, is giving a hand. Dale comes in from the woodlot and heads to the bathroom to wash the grime from his hands. Four-year-old Alden sits down at the table, his wide eyes fixated on the sweet potato pie. Lunch begins and I embark on my usual round of conversational questions: How long have you been here? What motivated your decision to come here? Has the garden always been this size? What level of self-sufficiency have you reached? What level do you want to reach? Talk focuses on economic limits: Robin is forced to pay capital gains tax on a house she sold to come here. It is an irony that frustrates her, paying taxes to “the system” for having tried to leave the system. Dale and Robin hope to get “off the grid,” by which they mean both the local electric supply particularly and life regulated by a consumer economy 12 Conversion more generally. They are proud of their productive garden and the dense woodlot that provides them with heat through the winter. But more often than commenting on what they have achieved, they upbraid themselves for what they have not. Dale, in particular, chastises himself for not having heeded Scott Nearing ’s dictum “Pay as you go.” Such an approach would have been ideal, but between taxes, tools needed for the homestead, and health insurance to consider, “Endure necessary debt” has become the temporary real-life motto. Both Dale and Robin recognize that they face some economic burdens that Helen and Scott did not face when they embarked on their homesteading experiment in the 1930s: higher land prices and taxes, rising health costs, less access to inexpensive tools and supplies, and, most significant, providing for two young children. Nevertheless, Helen and Scott remain their ideal models, even when remembered in the very real context of day-to-day life on Forest Farm. “What does homesteading mean to you?” I ask, half expecting Dale or Robin to comment on the natural surround: the way the light is falling on the ash trees or the way the birds are flitting through the branches. “It’s about home, I guess,” Dale replies, “about being at home, about centering your life around home.” Dale comments further that homesteading is about recognizing that focus and about reordering one’s life around the true center. Robin agrees while offering her own details of what placing home at the center means, commenting particularly on her commitment to food production at all levels, gardening, preserving , and cooking. “Knowing where food really comes from” and perfecting techniques for raising “healthy food” in a “natural” way are essential to her way of living.2 Raising the children at home is also an important priority for both Dale and Robin, although they are also committed to keeping their children involved in local groups so that Sally and Alden will be exposed to other children and to opportunities to learn off the homestead. While they do not speak harshly of the public school system in academic terms, they are quite concerned about the socialization processes that peer pressure can foster: bullying, cliques, and the desire for unnecessary things. They offer examples of local kids they know for whom the public school experience has done more harm than good. While Dale and Robin worry about money and the inevitable ties between needing to make money and participating in a consumer culture they want to reject, they do feel that they have begun to...

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