Well, I’ve gone and done it, something I’ve been considering for years. I have rented out my house in the woods to the new teacher at the high school, and moved into the old house that holds the Two Rivers Clinic and Center for Sustainable Medicine. One of my colleagues had moved out and another was looking for a shared space with his sweetie, so I said “This is it: an opportunity to try truly sustainable living as a health care provider.” Yes, we’re all here–kids, medical dog and all. The chickens are on their way as soon as I get a fence up. Not all amenities are quite in place yet, but it’s amazing what a localvore can cook up on a single electric burner when friends are coming for dinner, and lucky for me I have several close friends with showers and the best secret swimming hole just a minute’s walk away, since a claw foot bathtub turns out to be a lot more expensive to install than I thought.
My old office is now my bedroom and writing space, and the office next door is back to its original use as the boy’s bedroom. Henry and Alden asked me if they could spray paint the ceiling, and I said “sure.” We went out and collected a bunch of leaves and ferns, and used them as stencils, along with a few paper cutouts of baseball players. We now have the coolest ceiling in town.
Downstairs we have three “clutter-free” zones, the waiting room, my new office (the one with the big window looking out on the old tree, the sunniest room in the house.) and the kitchen. These zones are all in use for my medical practice in homeopathy and community acupuncture, but after school the waiting room turns into our living room, and the kitchen is in use all day, as I often have some wonderful soup or curry cooking up while I’m working—one of the reasons I wanted to live and work in the same space. I told my friends: “Instead of never being home, now I’ll always be home.” It’s great to be able to run upstairs and grab a t-shirt as the day warms up, rather than wishing I had brought a change of clothes since I don’t want to drive 8 miles to get something cooler or warmer to wear. Likewise if a kid forgets a lunchbox or his homework, no biggie, I can just zip it up the hill one mile to the school, rather than having to cancel a patient just to rectify the situation.
Living on Route 113, a two-lane state road that goes all the way from East Thetford to Chelsea, Vermont, and next door to the highway department and their sandpit is a bit of a challenge, noise-wise. My initial panic has calmed down a bit, since I have made an arrangement to use a friend’s hogan for quiet time when I need it. When the pickup trucks start blasting by at rush hour I have learned to flip on a country western station and start frying something up for dinner, and engage in a fantasy that I am a waitress in a little roadside café in some cowboy town out West, waiting for my honey to drop by. (You didn’t know I have a secret desire to be a country western singer, did you?)
In more meditative moods, I pray for a future when the only sound outside will be an occasional bus, bringing all those folks back home on one set of wheels, the way things are in Cuba—with almost no cars on the road, except those turquoise and chrome beauties that have been kept running by sheer ingenuity since 1956. At an alternative clinic I visited there, busloads of elderly people were given free transport from the outlying towns to the clinic in Matanzas where they received every imaginable form of alternative medicine: massage, acupuncture, homeopathy, magnet therapy, and more—all paid for by the Cuban national health care service. The roads are beautifully quiet, even in the city. And the cars that are on the road are required to pick up hitchhikers, in order to conserve fuel.
We have a lot to learn from Cuba, and will soon wish we had paid more attention to what they were doing as they transitioned to a self-sufficient, non-petroleum-based society, rather than bashing them for their politics.
The Cuban model of community medicine is part of what inspired me to try living here in the clinic. In Cuba, there is one doctor for about every 250 people, and the doctor lives right in the neighborhood, practicing out of a home-based office, so that she is available to the people who live there at all times, and knows her patients in more contexts than just office visits.
By having a home-based clinic, I don’t have to pay to heat my home when I’m at work, or my work when I’m at home, or waste all that fuel either. I can pay one electric bill, and have one internet service. I can start supper during a break and mail out a package of medicine as I take my dog for her morning walk. My kids can jump on the school bus in the morning, and get off in the afternoon, and I can spend several days at a time without needing to even start the car (not to mention that I’m right next door to the auto repair shop.) If a kid has a cold, I don’t have to cancel the whole day’s work; I can stash them up in their room and check in on them periodically while they sleep it off. Snow, sleet, rain? No problem, I’m already at work. If patients don’t get here, well, I can catch up on paperwork, or take a nap.
As for the road noise? Well, I may look for a quieter place to do this work/home thing, or I might just bank on the inevitability of buses in rural Vermont, or the fact that even my hearing will probably dull with the years. In the meantime I’m on the pick-up drop-off drop-in route for friends ready to pick up kids on the way to little league practice or just stopping by for a chat, and passing farmers who stash raw milk, fresh meat, and hand-picked raspberries in my fridge when I’m not looking, in trade for acupuncture.
I just came back from Eric Frost’s funeral. He was 24, killed in a hit-and-run accident in Oregon a few days ago. He was traveling north, on foot, with some possessions, twenty bucks, and a stray dog he had picked up along the way. The dog was thrown, but not killed, and sat guarding Eric’s body until somebody found them. The dog came East for the funeral, and the original owners saw the dog’s picture in the paper, and will be getting her back soon.
Eric’s dad lives near me, (in Thetford Center, Vermont) in a group of hogans (kind of like yurts, but made of wood) next to a beaver pond. Eric grew up there, where he and his sisters each tended their own fire in their own little house. Water is pumped with a hand pump, and the lights are mostly kerosene, solar added only recently. The fridge runs on propane.
We buried Eric after four hours of storytelling about his life and work during an interfaith service at the church on the hill. In a small town like ours you can have a service with 300 people there and know 90% of them. I like that. I also liked that hardly anyone was dressed up.
Erik was an Aquarius. An old soul, ahead of his time: not an easy combination. Donna Moody said this meant he was usually frustrated, and often angry, because what seemed obvious and simple to him was way out of everyone else’s reach. A deep reader and philosophical thinker, he dealt with his frustration by trying to do the right thing: delivering food to homeless people, helping out a disabled family, feeding a dog whose owner had been arrested, talking about the absurdity of young people killing other young people in wars. Elizabeth Upton ended the service by saying really slowly: “Eric, we love you. We got your message.” And she urged us to go home, and before we closed our eyes to go to sleep tonight, to think about a part of ourselves that we had left behind along the way, that needed to be brought back. He also had a great sense of humor: when his Dad asked him how he had liked California, he said “I love it: The trees are bigger, the girls are prettier, and the toilet paper is softer.”
We buried Eric’s ashes in a deep hole dug into the frozen Vermont ground, on the darkest night of the year—the winter solstice. ( The last time I saw Eric was on the summer solstice, in this same spot.) The sun had gone down, but one of Eric’s friends had gone ahead and made a fire next to the grave. Donna and John Moody kept it simple, and sacred. John smoked his tobacco pipe and Donna sprinkled sage, sweetgrass, cedar, and tobacco into the grave, speaking easily of the spirit, mother earth, and the four directions. Donna apologized to his mother as she deposited the first gift for Eric’s spirit to take along the way–an organic cigarette, the kind he smoked. Then John climbed into the hole and invited everyone to place whatever they had brought for him in the hole in the earth—a bearskin, a freshly tanned deer hide, chocolate, lucky coins, a heart shaped rock, a lock of his mother’s hair, a Bob Dylan recording, some favorite books, and many other items went into the earth to accompany him on his journey. John’s pipe fell in, but was retrieved, with a laugh. “Nice try,” said John shaking his finger.
Then we filled the hole back up, with many people taking turns digging. “Wow, you people really know how to move dirt,” said John, “From now on I’m going to call you the Ompompanoosuc grave diggers society.”
Tomorrow at 1:00 is the give-away, friends will come and take what they want of Eric’s possessions.
To me, this whole event reminded me of how powerful ritual can be when it is kept down to earth and close to nature. There was nothing that happened in a ministerial “holier than thou tone” of voice, even the prayers were just people talking to each other. Everyone who led anything or did anything was a friend. It was just people helping other people. Neighborliness. The food was not catered; it was all brought by neighbors, including enough supper for everyone who stayed on into the night. Eric was buried at home, next to his childhood dog. No casket, no funeral home.
Connections like these are powerful medicine.