Reduce, reuse … reboot
Vt. mother-daughter plug simple life in blog
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Jane Dwinell and Dana Dwinell-Yardley Jeb Wallace-Brodeur / Times Argus |
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By KEVIN O’CONNOR
Staff Writer - Published: May 11, 2008
When Montpelier mother and daughter Jane Dwinell and Dana Dwinell-Yardley decided to write a public plea for economic and environmental sanity, they reached back two centuries to borrow the title of Thomas Paine’s 1776 treatise "Common Sense."
Then they plugged the historic heading atop their Internet blog.
This being the 21st century, sharing logic on a laptop may not sound revolutionary. But the computer is among the duo’s few holdings that feed on modern power.
The 54-year-old mother and 21-year-old daughter (along with husband/father Sky Yardley and 17-year-old son/brother Sayer Dwinell-Yardley) not only eat food they grow or buy from producers within a 100-mile radius, but also live comfortably in a self-built home with wood heat, solar hot water and a monthly budget of $400.
How? Check out their "Common Sense" blog on www.vtcommons.org and you’ll find their "New Year’s Resolutions" post advises readers to stop shopping at chain stores: "You may think you’re saving a few bucks, but you’re not. Vermont workers and downtowns are paying the price."
To eat local food: "Dairy products or meats would be the easiest, grains and legumes harder, but possible. Fruits and vegetables would be possible as well — but you may not want to start this resolution until July unless you’ve planned ahead or are friends with a farmer with a good root cellar!"
To take up handicrafts such as sewing, carpentry or canning: "Think of a practical skill you’ve always wanted to know how to do — and learn it! Support the traditional Vermont values of personal and community independence and self-reliance."
Add their chicken-filled yard to the virtual picture and it would seem this family lives as far from civilization as from current times. But the two proponents of old-fashioned self-sufficiency are not only blogging — "Send us your questions and comments about food, fuel, family, or financial independence!" — but also doing so from a downtown Montpelier neighborhood just blocks from the Statehouse.
Salad days
Dwinell — just call her Jane, both she and her daughter say — was born in 1953 at the capital’s old Heaton Hospital, east of Main Street and in window view of her current home. But her story goes back seven generations to the time her father’s ancestors immigrated to Calais and her mother’s family moved to Braintree.
"As a multi-generation Vermonter," she says, "common sense was something I was raised with."
Jane grew up in her neighborhood in her grandparents’ house. Walking past the Statehouse to school, she’d look up at the statue of Ceres — the goddess of agriculture atop the golden dome — and think of Dwight Dwinell, "a relation of some sort" who, as sergeant at arms in 1938, saved money by single-handedly carving the figure to replace sculptor Larkin Mead’s deteriorating original.
Jane may have deep roots, but she isn’t one to sit still. She tried Antioch College in Ohio, transferred to the University of Vermont, earned degrees in history and nursing, moved to Seattle and boomeranged back to work at Gifford Medical’s Birthing Center in Randolph and in nursing homes and hospice programs in the Northeast Kingdom.
And that’s just for starters. Don’t ask her to stop and figure out dates. She’s too busy recalling how she went on to open a "vegetarian hippie" restaurant in the mid-1980s back in Randolph.
"That’s where I met my husband — he delivered my produce on Thursday afternoons."
After she married, Jane took up farming and writing (her 1992 book, "Birth Stories: Mystery, Power, and Creation," chronicles her nursing years), then traveled west yet again — this time to a seminary in California. Returning as a Unitarian Universalist minister, she headed a small parish in Derby Line before co-authoring a second book, "Big Ideas for Small Congregations: A Friendly Guide for Leaders."
Somehow amid it all she found time to have children, giving birth to her daughter in 1987 and her son in 1990. They were teenagers when the family decided to come full circle and settle back in Montpelier.
Buying two hillside acres from the former Vermont College in 2004, the foursome spent two years designing and building their own energy-efficient home. Their biggest challenge: They wanted to certify the structure through the federal government’s Energy Star program, but because they don’t own a dishwasher or clothes dryer, they didn’t have enough electrical appliances to qualify.
'Learning goes on'
Jane's collaborative relationship with her daughter began with homeschooling.
After a natural birth, she considered it the logical next step. Rather than induce or intervene, she wanted to work in partnership with her child (and, as mandated, the Vermont Department of Education). In one recent post, the two women note, "Our family has been homeschooling for 21 years (learning goes on your whole life, you know) and we wouldn’t have wanted it any other way."
Children can benefit, the two write, by being able to concentrate on what’s important to them.
"Because they are learning what they want, when they want (not on some top-down schedule driven by regulations and requirements), the knowledge stays with them," they write.
Parents, for their part, can discover more about their children and their world.
"Those of you who are parents know the thrill of watching your child learn to walk, talk, dress themselves," they continue. "You may find you’ve forgotten all the things you learned in school when the questions start flying: Why is the sky blue? How do clouds change shape? Why is there war? How does the Electoral College work, and who dreamed up that idea?"
And families can benefit from the flexibility.
"You can rest and drink tea when you’re sick, not worried about missing deadlines. You can drop what you’re doing to go skiing on a powder day, or go kayaking when the springtime rivers are just right. Being freed from the iron fist of daily structure brings families together and allows parents, children, and siblings to know each other as people."
Such unconventionality can jar the conformist crowd. Dana, for example, has never called her parents "mother" or "father" but instead refers to them by their first names.
"Other people called them Jane and Sky, so why should I call them Mama and Papa?" she says. "I don’t see my parents as authority figures — they’re people like anybody else."
Her mother is also her mentor. Dana still had baby teeth when she eyed Jane writing on a computer.
"I remember that first Apple II when I was 3 or 4."
Dabbling in graphic design, Dana was a teenager when she produced her mother’s church newsletter and 20 when she helped with the "Big Ideas for Small Congregations" book. Today she works part-time at the weekly Montpelier Bridge and nearby Northfield News and Transcript.
Then, out of the blue, came the blog.
Question of value
The mother-daughter duo took to the Internet last December upon the invitation of Rob Williams, editor of the Vermont Commons newspaper and its Web site, www.vtcommons.org.
"I started building our blogging roster looking at issues related to 21st-century sustainability — climate change, peak oil — and how are we going to get Vermonters to be more self-sufficient and self-reliant," Williams says. "Jane and Dana, living as urban homesteaders in Vermont’s capital city, are figuring out ways to feed and power themselves — and they can write, to boot. It seemed like a natural fit."
When the two talk of "financial independence," they’re not looking to win the lottery. They’d rather save money than spend it. Reading the book "Your Money or Your Life," they began to record every penny earned or expended as they asked themselves: "Is this purchase in alignment with our values?"
Starting out, the family already was growing much of its food, turning off lights when not in use and doing without such energy drainers as a television and microwave. But it found it could save more. The biggest way: Not buying so much "stuff."
"It’s a little radical to say, ‘Don’t think about buying things,’" Dana acknowledges. "People say, ‘Well, we’ll buy eco-friendly stuff,’ but it’s still stuff. It has a green label on it, but it’s still consuming resources."
If they can’t reuse or recycle, they do occasionally shop. But they only spend cash on hand and save their credit card for travel reservations. Because they purchased their property and building materials with money from the sale of their previous house, they don’t have a mortgage. Without bills for cable or fancy clothes, they’ve pared their household budget to $400 a month for phone, utilities, taxes and supplies.
Food is extra. Then again, their yard is one big vegetable garden surrounded by apple trees and berry bushes. The chickens that sunbathe on the stone entryway lay several dozen eggs a week. Mother and daughter make their own yogurt from local milk and bread from local spelt (a grain that’s considered the grandfather of wheat).
They do occasionally buy imported coffee, chocolate, olive oil and nuts from local suppliers. But everything else stays on the supermarket shelf.
"Imagine how you would feel after traveling 1,500 miles to spend the holidays somewhere," they wrote on their blog. "About as tired as those Mexican squashes or Chilean apples, we would wager."
They’re no more swayed by consumerism than by the calendar.
"We don’t have to blindly embrace holiday traditions dictated by the mainstream culture: over-decorated houses, rich, processed food, fancy and stressful parties, demanding consumerism by our children, and shopping, shopping, and more shopping," they wrote in one post.
But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped giving: They just spend their money on charitable contributions and choose presence over presents.
'A better quality'
By economizing, no one in the family has to work full-time (Jane is a part-time church consultant, her husband is a part-time mediator). They report only one downside: They can’t afford health coverage and must devote more than a thousand dollars of their small annual income to insure their Toyota Prius hybrid.
But the family believes the benefits outweigh such costs. Jane and her husband have time to travel, be it to live several months a year on a houseboat in France or, this spring, help restore hurricane-ravaged homes in Louisiana and Mississippi. And Dana has the flexibility to ski or snowboard at the drop of a snowflake.
They also avoid the whiplash of a roller-coaster economy. In a recent blog post, they sum up and share their lifestyle to those worried about the ups and downs of a recession, the stock market or pension plan.
Step one: "Stop spending money, except on necessities." That means limiting yourself to essential food, shelter and transportation costs and keeping entertainment to board games, library books, hiking, biking and free public performances.
Step two: Pay off your debts, save money you aren’t spending (they like local banks or tax-free bonds that finance state schools, hospitals and housing) and invest in energy-efficiency improvements, be it building insulation or a vehicle that gets more miles to the gallon.
"Even if the economy rebounds and stabilizes," they write, "your life will be better for having that savings cushion, being out of debt, having a cozy home, and knowing you’re not caught up in the ‘spend and owe’ cycle like some governments we know."
Sayer, hearing his mother and sister share their story, wonders if outsiders will view his family as hippies.
"We’re just normal people," the short-haired teenager says.
Jane and Dana agree. But they know others can think differently.
Jane: "You get, ‘I can’t work part-time, I could never homeschool my kids, I can’t imagine having a garden or not having a TV ...’"
Dana: "People say, ‘You’re this model, but I could never do that.’"
They can — and do.
"There are a lot of side effects to living this way," the mother says. "The biggest one is the freedom that you have. Because we don’t spend that much money, we don’t have to earn that much money, so we have time to do what we want."
"And it’s a better quality of life," the daughter continues. "If you eat local food, the food tastes better."
"And it feels good to support people we know," the mother concludes. "That’s the beauty of it. It’s good for the environment and it’s good for the community."
That includes the passersby who stop to see if those really are chickens circling around a racetrack of raised garden beds.
"We do tend to stop traffic," Jane says.
Contact Kevin O’Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.