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Still, I found it remarkable that his recollection of these two TV episodes remained so vivid after many years—it was as if they were scenes from his own past. It was also striking that his few memories of the technological world included one of Frankenstein.

He took me outside and showed me his blade-sharpening apparatus. It consisted of a vise mounted on a stand, and a file. He demonstrated how to sharpen a saw, then gave me a turn. I ran the file at forty-five degrees in the crevice between every tooth, alternating directions depending on whether the tooth pointed to the left or to the right. Conversation flowed freely as I played with the file and ran it through my fingers. And the action of sharpening added a subtext to Cornelius’s message: the community might have even more leisure if it just scaled technology back a bit further.

After getting to know only three of my neighbors better, I was becoming more certain of an impression I had already received at the barn raising and the beard-bragging session: that there was more than one way to live with less technology. The common ground held by the different members of this community, indeed, was still being mapped out. As things stood now, what joined them together, beyond certain basic positions on Christianity and the use of machinery, was a willingness to differ.

Edna

Time wasn’t diminishing Mary’s gusto. Far from wearing her down, a more physical life had notably improved her health. After a month or two on the farm, a mysterious stomach ailment she had suffered in Boston disappeared on its own. Whether it was the fresh air, the exercise, the slower pace, the organic vegetables, or a combination of the above, we didn’t know. What we did know was that she had never felt better.

In this flowering of health and hardiness, pregnancy was affecting her little. After that initial twinge of morning sickness, she cured the problem by eating more. We had read that the cause of this malady is not food but its lack, as the body’s metabolism changes to feed two persons instead of one. She simply ate the nausea away.

Her main lingering symptom was external: she showed early and large. Though a hardy one, Mary is slender and small-boned. There was nowhere for the baby to go but forward. That new protuberance altered the physics of her posture, and the one real problem pregnancy posed was back strain.

Needless to say, as month yielded to month, this problem didn’t go away but worsened. It became harder and harder for Mary to bend in the garden, and finally even to walk. Bicycling was an antidote; the steady keel of the wheels reduced bouncing. But since she was carrying more weight, she couldn’t keep up with me when we biked together, so I located a used tandem, and voilà: we soon found we loved getting around on the bicycle-built-for-two. On Sundays we would noodle all over the community, making visits. We discovered one long round-trip loop from our house that seemed to go downhill the whole way. (There was an explanation for this: by walking the bike up a short but very steep incline at the beginning, we coasted gradually downwards for most of the remainder. We called that route our Moebius trip. It was one of my favorite low-tech tricks, like winding a clock and letting the stored energy in the mechanism do the rest.)

One stop on our route was Edna’s. Edna, the Minimite midwife, was married to the deacon and lived on the opposite edge of the community from us in a remote and woodsy cul-de-sac. She was soft-spoken but self-confident, with a steady, calming gaze.

After a gentle pat-down of Mary’s abdomen on the first visit, she determined that the baby was properly positioned, head down and posterior up. She recommended that Mary drink plenty of raspberry-leaf tea in preparation for delivery, to reduce chances of bleeding, and she supplied us with a large bag of home-picked raspberry leaves at nominal cost. She also handed us a kit of supplies that would be useful when the time came, with such things as plastic