Living Light

What Does It Mean To Exist In A More Sustainable Way? Three Writers Describe Making Changes—big And Small.

- Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

The decision to move to Maine, which I did in 2009, was made at least partly for the benefit of living in harmony with nature and raising my future children in a not entirely frenetic world. My husband and I bought an 1840s farmhouse so close to the coast that we could see the light on the waves twinkle through the trees and set about making the most of the old-school resources around us: planting a decent vegetable garden, marveling at our hive full of bees, and congratulating ourselves on our growing compost heap.

There was one small problem in this effortful yet charmed existence: winter, which in Maine lasts for a good seven months. I grew up in Chicago and spent years living in New York, so I assumed that I understood frigid weather. Rural winters at this northern latitude, however, are another story.

The breeze blowing off the water from a strong wind sent shivers through the curtains and up our spines, and the floorboards were pure ice underfoot. I piled on the sweaters that first year, and even slept once or twice in a wool hat. I learned that this was par for the course when a neighbor’s daughter told me that when she was a small child, she awoke one morning to find that her teddy bear was stuck frozen to the wall on an especially bitter night in her parents’ ancient farmhouse.

Around the turn of the last century, our place, which is now surrounded by woods, sat stark on a bald hilltop with nary a tree in sight. Without burning through a forest’s worth of firewood each winter, as they did back then, or through as much in petrochemicals, or hydropower, perhaps obtained by impinging on indigenous water rights with collateral damage to wildlife, we never really discovered how to beat the cold without hammering away at fossil fuels.