Book Review:
Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life by Jean Hay Bright
For anyone that's read Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life
From their first encounter with the Nearings, through purchasing land, building their own home, learning to butcher, and much more. Stories of the various interesting back-to-the-land neighbors, visitors, and traditional townsfolk make for great reading. Bright does a great job of including quotes from letters she wrote her mom during this time with a look back and interpretation based on what she learned later. There's nice bits of research about the Nearings tucked here and there, but the book never reads like a boring examination of them. Rather, it contributes to the story. SHe writes about natural childbirth to cutting ice to slaughtering pigs to canning and gardening, living through snow storms, picking up a little cash money through writing for the local paper, and, eventually, deciding to leave that lifestyle.
After seven years of homesteading together, Bright and her husband got divorced. They had two young children. She eventually bought a house that needed a lot of work and came with a lot of land. But she came to realize she was ready for a change. "Knowing you can do something is different than wanting to." She began working full time as a reporter.
She mentions that the Nearings liked a life of 4-4-4. Four hours of hands-on bread labor, four hours of intellectual head work and four hours of socializing. It sounds like a nice balance. But her own pattern was more like mine, measured in years, shifting from one main focus to another. After 5 years of the newspaper, she starts running an organic farm. And after that, she's into politics for a while.
The final section of the book explores the Nearings in more detail, examining inconsistencies in their public statements about how they lived. It makes for interesting reading. She notes that she and her husband could never have survived on only 4 hours of bread labor a day. It takes a lot of work to live off the land, a lot more than 4 hours a day. But I do like the goal of finding a way to live the 4-4-4 plan.