Back to the land? Ann Shrader never left. For her, the self-sustaining, healthy communal life envisioned and celebrated in the Sixties and Seventies is alive and well.
Ann lives in a cabin on the Little River five miles outside the village of Floyd in southwest Virginia where she chops her wood to heat her home on two and a half acres. She cultivates a large garden, raising vegetables for herself and the local food shelf and trading them for massage with a neighbor. Her specialty is cow peas, a nitrogen-fixing crop, that she raises for the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
“Gardening is real important, it preserves my mental and physical health,” says Ann. “Being outside is important and connections with my neighbors.”
After Carleton, she and her partner Laird Schaub ‘71 lived in a shared Carleton household in Washington, D.C., while she worked as a recreational therapist at a mental institution. “We realized it was not what we wanted to be doing, and we wanted to be in the Midwest, so we considered starting a community ourselves,” she explains. “Then we found Sandhill Farm in northeast Missouri and joined it. Laird and I had a son, and he was home schooled. Years later, I dropped our son off at Amherst, where he was accepted even though he was raised in a commune where he grew up using an outhouse and milking a cow.”
“The big thing is I had breast cancer while I was there. It changed me, in some ways it opened up my life to more possibilities. I gained a new energy, learned to take hikes and do healing with love. I lived in Sandhill 28 years, then I came to Floyd, because northeast Missouri was very isolated while Floyd has all sorts of resources and people around.”
“Leaving the commune and landing in Floyd at age 50, I had to hustle, to learn all sorts of stuff I had not done,” she notes. “At the commune, different people did things, and suddenly I had to deal with a car and cooking every day. I took nursing aide training and do end of life care. I now freelance.”
She currently cares for an 89-year-old man with dementia and a woman with Down’s Syndrome. Whom she cares for and where and how she lives was and is fundamental. “Floyd has lots of music, a strong women’s community, art, communes, CSAs and gardening, mountains, the Blue Ridge Parkway—it’s a very positive place to live.”