Photo: Fred J. Field
What does this little love story from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine have to do with land conservation? Certainly the connection is tangential, but it is too good a story not to share.
A few years ago, TPL was involved in a complicated effort to protect Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine. Since we needed to raise money for the project, and it seemed like a good story, we pitched a Maine-based freelance writer named Stacey Chase to go to Sabbathday and interview the four remaining Shakers in the world. (Members of the sect, as you may know, do not marry and are sexually abstinent.)
Chase did interview the Shakers, ended up marrying one of them, and as a result, there are now three remaining Shakers in the world.
My article on the world’s last four Shakers was at first only unusual because it was a rare glimpse into daily life at the Protestant monastic sect’s idyllic hilltop village in rural southern Maine. Never could I have imagined that that story, of all stories, would become the story behind the story of how I met, and eventually married, the long-sought love of my life.
TPL and its many partners successfully completed the project in 2006. You also may want to read Stacy Chase’s original story on the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village.
