Ester Franklin is a back-to-the-land kid. For the first sixteen years of her life, she didn’t have electricity. The link below provides an indexed, transcripted, and segmented version of Ester Franklin’s oral history: Ester Franklin’s Oral History
The Story
As a child, Ester Franklin spent her days playing in the woods. She knew which plants were edible and which plants were poisonous, and she spent her summer days eating berries and mushrooms and leaves. She built forts and slept outside, climbed trees, and roamed the local woods. Her childhood differed radically from the cookie-cutter houses and white-bread sandwiches that marked the lifestyles of suburban children in the 1980s.
However, growing up on a homestead in the 1970s presented difficulties, too. “I remember being younger, and filling the lamp with gas, all the lamps with gas, because I had a cold and I couldn’t distinguish between gas and kerosene. And there were so many times I almost killed myself,” Ester recalls in her hour-long oral history interview.
Her parents decided to move to Brighton, ME from Lexington, MA six months after Ester was born in 1974. They cleared land, built their own home, and lived without electricity. Ester’s parents, despite living on a homestead, worked in town to earn money. Ester’s childhood was deeply influenced by the drug and alcohol aspect of the 1970s counterculture, and, in her interview, she touches on the hardships caused by substance abuse and illness on the homestead.
After attending local schools, Ester matriculated to University of Maine Farmington, where she studied for a year before pausing her education. She then experimented with several different jobs and eventually wound up in the Peace Corps. She went back to college, selecting a small school in Alaska. After a year of studying in Alaska, she returned to Maine and finished school at the University of Maine, Farmington. She earned her graduate degree in Psychology from Goddard College, and she currently works as counselor in Skowhegan, Maine.
Today, Ester lives in Brighton, ME. She bakes bread on Sundays, barters with her friends, and competes in ironman triathlons.