Nurtured by Nature: Remembering a Back-to-the-Land Childhood
(Page 2 of 5)
December 2008/January 2009
By Liz Stuart
The nighttime harvest was my favorite fall tradition. Usually it was a clear night, so we would be under the moon and stars with flashlights and lanterns, coming back an hour or two later with baskets and boxes full of the year’s final bounty.
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Unconventional Amenities
My parents’ house has many unique qualities beyond its vertical-log walls and outdoor stairs: most noticeably, its lack of a standard toilet. Instead, I grew up with a classy homemade composting privy that provides fertilizer for the ornamental beds and is sealed against any possibility of contaminating groundwater. The composter has a polished wood toilet and windows on two sides. It’s accessed via a covered walkway from the main house and does double duty as a “natural history museum,” housing my parents’ collection of shells, rocks and miscellaneous items displayed on shelves crafted by my mother. It is easy to spend more than the necessary amount of time there, admiring the view or listening to the woods on a summer night, enjoying an atmosphere that is rarely found accompanying a more orthodox commode.
Bathing was another part of everyday life that took an unusual form during my upbringing. We did not have a “real” bathroom until about 1996, when I was in the sixth grade. At this point, Tighe and I were beginning to get self-conscious about taking a bath in half of a blue plastic 50-gallon barrel in front of the woodstove in the main room. Mom and Dad partitioned a section of the house and built a counter, cabinets and a bathtub/shower. Having lived without a water heater for 20 years, my parents maintained that a couple of big pots of water on the stove were quite effective for heating water. So even after the bathroom was finished, the fixtures only ran with cold water. For a shower, we emptied a pot of hot water into a 5-gallon bucket, carried it into the bathroom, cooled it with water from the tap and then bathed by dipper. It probably sounds primitive to most people, but this always felt more fulfilling to me than a standard shower, perhaps because it enabled me to bathe by my own work rather than just the turn of a knob.
Homestead Homeroom
When Tighe and I were old enough to start school, our parents decided that we should be home-schooled for the first few years. (They worked contract jobs in forestry that allowed enough flexibility for one or both of them to teach us.) There were several reasons for this decision, the most prominent was the fact that in 1990 the bus ride from the end of our driveway to Sadie Halstead Elementary in Newport took an hour and a half. My parents reasoned that no 6-year-old should have to sit on a bus for three hours a day. So we were kept home, with Mom and Dad teaching us from workbooks, and we joined a “home-school group” with three children of family friends who lived nearby. We met every Friday and rotated between our three families’ houses, giving us a chance to socialize, do educational projects and generally run amok in the woods. By the time we started public school in 1992, more bus routes had been created and the ride was down to 40 minutes.
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