Maggie Maurice: The Real Deal

Maggie Maurice, a long-time columnist for the Burlington Free Press died this week --

"Everybody read Maggie -- sometimes in self-defense. You want to know whether you were mentioned," said former Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin. "Some would call it a gossip column, but she was never mean-spirited. She was always kind. She gave the newspaper a personality."

Maurice's friends said the breezy, friendly style her readers saw in the paper was the real deal. "She's the most upbeat, most thoughtful, most generous, most loving person. She's always concerned about you, other people. She was never focused on herself," said Meredith Babbott of Burlington, one of Maurice's many longtime friends.

She'd long since stopped writing her columns. But I knew her as an active member of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Burlington. She attended church last Sunday. She had been an usher up until her recent illness forced her to stop; but that's how I met her on my very first visit to St. Paul's. Her greeting was gracious and hospitable. Whether you were a visitor or a regular parishioner, her infectious smile took you out of the doldrums and you just had to smile back in return! Blessings on dear Maggie.

A memorial service for Maggie will take place on Saturday, March 3, 2007 at the Cathedral Church of St Paul, 2 Cherry Street (corner of Battery), Burlington. Phone the Cathedral office at 802-864-0471 for the exact time.

Maggie Maurice Archive at the Burlington Free Press

Maggie's respect for people is shown particularly in this column:

Grinding out self-sufficiency

Published: Friday, February 16, 2007
Originally Published: Sept. 28, 1980

The flowers are out of hand at the Raymond Chadwick farm in Monkton. They grew so tall, Janet said, and she got too busy with other projects. Now in September, the garden is a colorful profusion of zinnias, nicotiana, calendulus, marigolds, roses, petunias, geraniums, foxglove, pansies and snapdragons.

She loves this time of year. “It’s harvest time,” she said. “This is the worst time to have company but the best time to visit. It says everything we’re trying to tell people.”

Janet Chadwick is the author of “How to Live on Almost Nothing and Have Plenty” (Alfred A Knopf, New York), “a practical introduction to small-scale sufficient living.”

Her weekly food bill is about $10.

It was $10 five years ago, but inflation has caught up with the Chadwicks, too. At that time, five of the children were home. Now there are two. They still spend $10 (for a family of four.).

They raise all their vegetables and fruit, milk, eggs, meat, grains and herbs. They make their own bread, butter, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, wine and liqueurs.

“We do go to the grocery store for paper supplies, cleaning products and just plain junk,” she said. “When I get short and buy bread, I feel guilty.”

On this cool sunny morning, she was making spaghetti sauce. Turkey bones were simmering in the crockpot. When she peeked in the oven you could see rolls rising on the rack.

“I keep the kitchen door open. It gets steamed up in here with the cooking,” she said.

You could smell the tomato sauce. Yes, she nodded, it always smells good in here.

In the fall she moves her picnic table into the kitchen to provide more work space. Apples, tomatoes, canning jars were lined up on it. Onions were hanging in the window. She will string hot, red peppers next week. When they’re dry she’ll put them in the root cellar.

Jan Chadwick’s story is almost a Cinderella tale.

She was 40 and her husband was 42 when they decided to change their lives. Their oldest son had died, at age 19, of a kidney disease. “I’d had it with the city. I knew I had to do something.”

In June 1974, they moved from Burlington to Monkton. By December they had built a small barn to house the livestock. They enlarged the one-story house, put a cellar under it. The animals arrived two days before Christmas. Two milk cows, two milk goats, two pigs, several rabbits, chickens, ducks and geese. She always says she learned to milk a cow with the cow in one hand and the how-to book in the
other.

Sitting down with a cup of coffee, an unusual sight for a Chadwick morning, she doesn’t look much like a pioneer. She smiles, almost laughs at the idea. “I am,” she said. “I didn’t know anything when we started.” She’s wearing a green blouse, black slacks, white socks, Hush Puppies. A person who always worries about being short (she’s 5 feet 2) and gaining weight (she wrote a cookbook this summer and asks “what are you going to do when you have to test 174 recipes?”), she has dark brown hair and enormous dark eyes, part of her French-Canadian heritage.

Her husband has a janitor service and works evenings, plus one or two days a week. Their children are Karen Marcelino, 26 (Karen’s husband built the rabbit cages); Gary, 24; David, 21; Mary, 18; and Kimberly, 15. A son, Steven, is deceased.

“They have been wonderful and so has my husband. I know it sounds corny, but they like life in the country,” she said.

She subscribes to many magazines. New Woman and Country Journal are on the coffee table, next to three volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson. “You don’t want to run to the hills and cut yourself off from everything. I enjoy keeping up with magazines and television. You invest time and elbow grease to have a lifestyle like this, but you want to stay in touch.”

“How To Live on Almost Nothing and Have Plenty” is a book of 271 pages. Chapter headings are to the point: “Keeping Bees,” “Raising a Veal Calf,” “Growing Fruits,” “Potpourri,” “Cooking for the Homestead.”

She recommends the chapter of recipes as a supplement for two cookbooks she uses, “Joy of Cooking” and “Putting Food By.” She includes recipes for convenience mixes you can make at home.

Illustrations are by Rachel Brown, carefully drawn so you really can tell how to build a goose house.

How does Jan Chadwick manage to get all these things done and write about it too?

“I have a really great family to take up the slack,” she said.

“I’ve often said I could use another 24 hours in each day. At least I go to bed tired.”

The house sits on a bluff above Silver Creek, not far from the road, just outside of Monkton. Between the little barn and the calf pasture is a perennial garden, berries, grapes and herbs, the poultry complex. There are piles of wood, more than they’ll need this winter.

It doesn’t look like the cover of the book. “Everything is overgrown this time of year. There’s too much going on to have it picture perfect,” she said.

The Chadwicks started with three and a half acres and have added 33 more, “which is more than enough to do all we talk about. We sell enough meat to pay utilities and taxes. We make our Christmas presents.”

Their schedule is hectic: They get up at 7, do the chores. (In her book she describes how many minutes it takes for each: rabbits, 5 to 8 minutes; pigs, 5 to 8, plus 30 minutes once a week to clean pens.) They have a light breakfast, watch the Today Show. In the morning, depending on the season, she raises seedlings in the
greenhouse, cans vegetables in the kitchen.

“By lunch time the place is a wreck. I spend an hour organizing. Between 2 and 4, we dig potatoes, pick vegetables the next morning. At 4, Ray and I have a glass of iced tea, or wine. And then it’s time for supper. Ray does the chores, goes to work. I clean up, plan.

Through the door behind her you can see the master bedroom, with her writing space by the window, small, uncluttered, organized. “I rented an electric portable to finish typing my book,” she said.

A large storage closet is off the bedroom, containing the stairs to the cellar. There are two large freezers, full, and shelves and shelves of canned goods (1,000 at last count). The root cellar, with its salt pork crocks and cheese aging box, will soon be full of carrots and cabbage.

Outside, the images left in the memory of the observer are in color. Janet standing next to the wood pile, holding a puppy; Janet gathering duck eggs; talking softly to the bunnies that were about to kindle; patting a goat named Heidi; a bantam rooster, silhouetted in the window, turning skittish when the photographer trained his lens on him.

The ducks wouldn’t come to her. She’s not the hand that feeds them.

“Here’s our smelly pigpen. We do produce marvelous pork,” she said. Pork was, she added, 32 and a half cents per pound, hanging weight. It will be lower this year. Grain went up but they used less. The customer takes it to the slaughter house, has it cut, packaged and smoked (“at Wallingford, without nitrates”).

The lambs got out and ate the tops off the strawberries. She lost her perennial herb garden because there was no snow cover last winter. Philosophically she took it in her stride. You expect things to go wrong, she said. She was standing near the new plants, so young it was almost impossible to tell the parsley and sage from the rosemary and fennel.

Does she keep a diary? “No, I never have time,” she said. A calendar, perhaps? Sort of.

“I play it by ear. I know I’ll buy hogs in the spring, feed them until late October when they get butchered. You can’t have real tight rules or you’re apt to make mistakes.”

“How To Live on Almost Nothing” evolved from a small booklet she prepared for Adult Basic Education in Vermont. “They heard what I was doing and asked if I would aim my material not only at teaching people to read but to live a better life,” she said.

An editor with Knopf, Jane Garrett of Starksboro, heard about the booklet at a conference.

“She came to see me. I guess she was surprised. I’m definitely not the hippie type, just a middle-aged, middle-class woman who accepts these challenges. She asked me if I’d like to write a book. I said I’d give it a try.”

Six weeks later, Knopf came back with an option, four months later, after submitting an outline of four chapters, Janet Chadwick received a contract and an advance of $3,500. She finished the book in September, 1978 and it was released in October, 1979.

Now Country Journal has taken her second one.

“God has blessed me. Let’s face it. I’m an unknown author and within 16 months, I have two books out,” she said.

She has appeared on talk shows and hot lines, answering questions like, “How can I lime my field without a spreader?” She loves being on television. The right kind of interviewer makes it so easy, she says.

One time she was in Brookfield, in her dungarees and heavy jacket, and a farmer said to her, “I saw you the other day on TV. Am I glad to see you dressed like this. I thought you were rich and didn’t know what you were talking about.

Janet Chadwick, who has bartered for everything from a new tile entryway to a Troy-Bilt rototiller, thought the remark was funny. Her one extravagance, if you can call it that, is her feet. She wears classy boots in the barn.

The number of family farms in Vermont is growing, she says. “Young people maybe hated it, but they grew up with morals and they knew the value of a buck. Now when they have their own kids, they say, ‘when I was a boy...’

“Everything starts at home,” she said. “I think it’s true for the whole nation.”

Life isn’t all work for the Chadwicks. They like to entertain, and they’re able to, because there’s always plenty of food on hand. They like to dance and go out for dinner.

She’s also the choir director at St. Jude’s Church in Hinesburg. “Without God I am nothing,” she said.