Membership in a Rural Community

Our community lost a shepherdess about a month ago. She and her husband have raised sheep for nearly 40 years on a mountain side farm overlooking the village. The white steeple church in town was filled to over flowing the day of her memorial service. Whether you had known her since childhood or for just a few months, you were there. This woman had left her mark on our small community and had touched many lives in her lifetime. The community gathered that day, neighbors, friends, family, and co-workers, to share their stories.

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

Wendell Berry

It is this concern for one another and trust that struck me about this memorial service. Barbara was a part of their lives and they a part of hers. This shepherdess was well respected in the village. Many trusted her to always come through when they needed her. Her care, support, and encouragement of others was evident by the filled pews in the old church.

For years, as a homeschooling family who lives fairly secluded outside of the village, I have felt as though I had no sense of belonging, no place, no community. We have always lived in the “old Royce family home” as though outsiders in our own walls. And then, I began to see the membership unfolding on our little mountain top. I couldn’t see it at first, because I didn’t understand it. I was blinded by the way life was in our city lives. We ask for service and we pay for the work done. At first, we rejected the free giving of others, feeling guilty we had not paid.

Then one day, I realized that we were in a membership. Our rural community was made up of the homes tucked behind the trees and crevices of our mountain. It then seemed an insult to offer to pay, to take from someone what they wanted to freely give. So we began giving back. Fresh eggs, syrup, and farm raised meat for helping us out of a bind with their tractor.

“With every person like her that dies,” my daughter said as we sat in the church service, “we move further away from the membership in Wendell Berry’s books.” This woman understood her responsibility to the members in her community. She gave freely. Surely Vermont will always have the membership. Surely the younger generations will value their place and carry on what these older farmers have been doing for years. Surely the membership will live in our rural community.