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Do-It-Yourself Home-Grown Wedding (in Vermont)
The older I get, the more I notice the effects in my life of stories of the American Frontier. Struggling with family genealogy, I finally located the Native American corner of my mother’s New England heritage (Wampanoag, not the Micmac she’d supposed). But across those same years, the horrors of the frontier — as it moved from the Atlantic coast, in the 1600s, all the way to California, Oregon, and Washington — have been reframed in our nation, and it seems both bizarre and cruel that children commonly played “cowboys and Indians” in the 1950s.
That wasn’t my game. But my mother taught me her New England ethos of craft, repair, and making a comfortable home through cooking, sewing, and cleaning, as well as learning good parenting skills. It sounded a lot like a modern version of frontier life. Arriving in northeastern Vermont with a four-month-old baby, a husband who wanted to both write, and master firearms, and very little money, it was fortunate that I already adored the idea of making ends meet and living off the land.
Grow a vegetable garden? Sure. Raise chickens? Mother Earth News encouraged me to hand craft the nesting boxes. Wash clothes in the bathtub, hang them outside to dry? Got it.
