Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life - Softcover

Jean Hay Bright

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0972092412 ISBN 13: 9780972092418

Publisher: BrightBerry Press, 2003

Synopsis

This is Jean Hay Bright's original 2003 memoir. (The Revised 10th anniversary edition is now available, at Amazon.com/Meanwhile-Next-Door-Good-Life/dp/0972092447) This early book chronicles the 1970s when Jean and her first husband, a traumatized Vietnam veteran, homesteaded in Harborside, Maine on land bought from Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of Living the Good Life.

With the help of letters Jean's mom saved and gave back to her, this memoir recounts the joys and pains of one woman's personal experience going back to the land, from personal and community dynamics, through several births and the many deaths in that neighborhood.

Beyond her own story, Jean also used her investigative reporting skills to examine some long-standing and nagging questions surrounding the Nearings. Her research turned up some surprising and enlightening facts about how Helen and Scott Nearing actually lived -- and died.

Part of the neighborhood dynamic Jean recounts involved abutters on the other side, Eliot and Sue Coleman (who also bought land from the Nearings), and their young daughters Melissa, Heidi and Clara. Eliot would later write several highly-popular gardening books, while some 40 years later (2011) Melissa would write her best-selling memoir, This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, 60 acres, and a Family Undone. Jean's book is the adult version of what happened on Cape Rosier during those years. The April 2012 paperback version of Melissa's book lists Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life among the sources for many of the non-family details woven through Melissa's text.

For those who want a closer look at Living the Good Life and how that best-selling Nearing book impacted real back-to-the-landers, Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life is for you.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Author Susan Hand Shetterly of Surry, Maine, sent this review to the publisher on Oct. 23, 2003 "Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life" is going to become one of those essential books to read in order to understand the back-to-the-land-movement in Maine. Jean Hay Bright's life in the woods may have been somewhat different from the lives of others trying to make their way out of what they felt was a society mired in corruption - trying to make their way toward a new and better choice - but there are themes common to all, and the first is the Vietnam War. No one should underestimate it. Another is the amount of hard labor we, as young homesteaders, were willing and able to do. To read Hay Bright's account is to bring back the joy of learning how to do for oneself: how to grow food, cook food, survive winters, raise chickens, raise children. Another is the desire to recreate something closer to the frontier family than the suburban family: a small, intense unit back-lit by a kerosene lamp. The War was an evil that came from outside and - if we were one of the lucky - just left us whip-lashed. What made those first, fresh-faced homesteading dreams die eventually came from what we carried inside us into the woods. The utopian life shattered under the weight of our own imperfections.

This is, in a sense, a story as old as time: a walk from innocence into experience. Who we believed in and some of what we believed in failed us. But the journey is important, and what Hay Bright knows we have left - after all this panning for gold - are the few bright nuggets of the real thing.

About the Author:

Jean Hay Bright was married to a Vietnam veteran when they moved to Maine to homestead in 1972. Her two children born that decade are now grown, her journalism career and political campaigns are behind her, and she now lives with her second husband on a small organic farm in central Maine.

About this edition

• Publisher: BrightBerry Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0972092412
• ISBN 13: 9780972092418
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: David Bright
• Illustrator: Samantha C. S. Jones