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By Root 380 0

she played classical records on the phonograph. Though Helen no longer practiced the violin with regularity, sometimes there’d be a live concert. We all sat on the floor of the Nearings’ long living room, me in the V of Mama’s legs, the room full of smells from a potluck and the sweat on the skin of the people gathered in the warm summer evening. Arranged before the fieldstone fireplace was not your traditional quartet, certainly, but one pulled together by Helen to take advantage of the talents in attendance.

Helen played a recorder or her violin. There might have been a lady with a dulcimer, similar to a violin but with a longer hourglass shape, that lay flat on her lap, three strings plucked by her fingertips to produce a folksy dulcy sound, or a Middle Eastern oud, a tear-shaped guitar with multiple strings over wood rosette, and perhaps someone with a hammered dulcimer, a trapezoid on legs topped with strings struck by small mallets to make tinny reverberating sounds. Whatever the odd combination, on Sunday nights at the Nearings’, music connected us to the world.

Papa said he’d learn to play an instrument if he wasn’t genetically tone-deaf, like Skates. The joke was that Skates couldn’t even sing in the shower. During his Dr. Zhivago phase, Papa fancied taking up the balalaika, but it mostly just hung on the wall. Mama had more of a natural gift for music. She tried to teach herself to play the dulcimer in the evenings, but claimed she didn’t have the time to get good at it. If Mama and Papa were to have musical themes the way Zhivago and Lara did, Papa’s would be the boogie-woogie on the piano, the popular bluesy dance music from the 1930s and ’40s with an upbeat rhythm and funky beat that made you want to get up and, well, boogie.

Mama’s theme song would have to be “Simple Gifts,” a hymn composed in the Shaker community of Alfred, Maine, in the mid-1800s and made popular by Aaron Copland in the 1940s. Mama loved to sing it as she worked or walked the paths in the woods.

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Music, I was learning, both came from the outside world and was uniquely our own. As I sat with Mama at the Nearings’ concert, drifting off on the river of sound, a familiar tune rose from the melody of strange instruments, and a friendly woman began to sing along beside us:

Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me.

I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.

While most of the flower children at the Nearings’ came and went, there was one cheerful face we began to see week after week. Susan showed up for a session and proved proficient at following Scott’s directions, so they asked her to stay the season and help run the summer workshops. Susan’s path to Cape Rosier was similar to that of Mama and Papa—she’d also found a copy of Living the Good Life at a health food store. She heard the Nearings were offering weeklong seminars, and decided to drive from Maryland to Maine to participate.

She had a cherubic smiling face and long brown hair in thick braids with a short line of bangs across her forehead. At twenty years old, she was about as excited to be alive as anyone we knew. Her bright eyes always seemed to be either slightly surprised or on the verge of laughter, and her musical voice could be heard exclaiming at the size of the zucchini in the garden in an extended “Ohhhhhh!” or singing along the forest paths. Susan’s laugh of ringing bells filled the Nearings’ patio at lunch as everyone gathered around her like bees to honey.

Susan was not alone in her desire to learn how to farm organically. The summer before, a large event held at Thomas Point Beach in Brunswick, Maine, brought together experts on organic gardening and farming with Scott and Helen