Episode #55: Ruth Chapter 3 - Money

Jan,16 2026

<-#54: Ruth Chapter 2 - Submission#56: Ruth Chapter 4 - Church ->

People imagine our town as if it were a theory. They ask whether we were communists, whether we followed some secret plan, whether Christopher designed a system he never wrote down. None of that is true. We were simply poor farmers who decided, without much discussion, to be poor together.

No one had money because there was almost no money to have. The fields gave potatoes, beans, milk, and stubborn chickens. What we grew was eaten first by the town that grew it. Only the extra was sold beyond our borders, and the coins from those sales were placed in a common tin box that smelled of tobacco and onion skins. That was our "treasury," though we never used such a grand word.

There was no central planning. No committee counted mouths and allocated bread. If a family needed more flour one month, they took more flour. If another family had a good year of apples, the rest of us tasted it in our pies. We were not organized; we were entangled, like vines that have grown together so long that no one remembers which was planted first.

Until the Second World War, this was enough. The government looked at us, saw no revenue, and mostly forgot we existed. Taxes were a rumor carried by travelers. We lived beneath the notice of the modern world, which was a kind of blessing Christopher never needed to name.

It was only after his death that people began to think more about themselves than about the town. The roads improved. Trucks arrived. Outsiders came not to trade but to stay for a week and sun their pale city skin. Suddenly our way of living had a price attached to it.

The most faithful among us decided to protect what remained. They raised the fence that still stands and called the enclosed land a naturist resort, a phrase that would have puzzled my grandfather. They gathered the parcels that families had used for generations and stitched them into a single piece. My father, being mayor and possessing more patience than legs, helped with the paperwork.

Each household sold its plot to the new corporation and received in return a free lease and a share of future profits. At the time, this felt like clever stewardship. We believed we were preserving Christopher's world inside a legal shell.

And profit there was.

More than any of us had ever imagined. The first summer the visitors came in numbers, leaving behind not only their clothes but also their coins. The tin box was replaced by a ledger, then by a bank account with a stamp and a stern clerk. Children who had grown up barefoot learned to wear shoes to town meetings.

This is how the commune became a business without anyone deciding it should. Modernity did not storm our gates; it bought a day pass and stayed for dinner.

Today I sit as president of that resort, a title I inherited from my mother, who inherited it from my father, who accepted it only because no one else would. I sign checks. I read insurance forms. Now I own a bank account because life, like bread, became kneaded with money whether we like the taste or not.

When Christopher lived, he made a small world where life was built with love and the rhythm of soil. I do not pretend we have preserved that world untouched. We have preserved a memory of it, a few habits, and a certain stubborn gentleness that still confuses our visitors.

Sometimes I think Christopher died at the right moment, before the day when individuality became law and community became a service to be purchased. He never had to choose between a garden and a balance sheet. That burden was left to us.

We carry it as best we can.

<-#54: Ruth Chapter 2 - Submission#56: Ruth Chapter 4 - Church ->