Simple Gifts: Lessons in Living from a Shaker Village

"This is a simple story that means the world to me," June Sprigg writes by way of preface to Simple Gifts, her memoir of a summer spent with the last seven residents of a New Hampshire Shaker community. It's a fitting motto for the serene, unadorned lives of these women--"members of an endangered species," as one of the elderly sisters wryly says--and of the joy they brought a girl who at 19 was "half in and half out of the egg." Although the Shakers took vows of celibacy, their religious tradition always included caring for children--especially those society refused to provide for--and after so many years, the sisters were delighted to have a girl to dote on once again. For her own part, Sprigg found much-needed guidance as she made her own transition into womanhood: "What might have seemed like the unlikeliest of friendships--me at nineteen, a miniskirted college sophomore, and six Shaker sisters in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, soft and wrinkled as old plums--made sense, perhaps to our mutual surprise." As Sprigg spends the summer guiding tours, working alongside the sisters, and poring over old journals, a portrait emerges of a community that remains vital even during its twilight years. Perhaps more importantly, Sprigg finds a spiritual lineage that stretches from one generation to the next--even, she imagines, coming to rest in a non-Shaker like herself. More than just a profile of a historical curiosity, this memoir tells the stories of seven remarkable but very different women, and in the process offers a invaluable testimony to the life of the spirit put into joyous practice.