The three people living in the world’s only active Shaker community plan for the future.
| Gillian Graham, Portland Press Herald |
The Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village looks like a painting in the early morning light, its neat row of white buildings dappled with sun and backed by a rolling green pasture dotted with sheep. Soon, gardeners will arrive to work alongside the Shakers and the hum of daily life will fill the idyllic hillside village.
The silence is broken only by bird song and the whoosh of traffic in the distance. Tom, the resident cat, lounges on the back steps of the dwelling house, lazily watching the birds. He’d already killed a chipmunk this morning, Brother Arnold Hadd says as he steps out of the kitchen, a can of cat food in hand.
Brother Arnold walks briskly toward the barn, his black work boots slapping the dirt driveway as he chats breezily with Michael Graham, the director of the Shaker Museum and Library and a friend of the Shakers for three decades. Their familiar banter centers on who works the hardest during morning barn chores, which these days revolve around the largest flock of sheep the Shakers have had in years. There are 70 now; 22 were born last spring, thanks to a ram that was thought to be fully castrated but was not. Others found refuge on the farm when their owners could no longer keep them but didn’t want to send them to the slaughterhouse.
“Children!” Brother Arnold calls out to the sheep lingering near the pasture fence. He knows each by name.
