1975 - Getting Married; Friends Help Clear "The Land" for their Homestead; Linda & Paul Return the Favor

Click on the arrows below to open each topic

They called their disassembled compatriots, friends, family a week after they decided to marry, a week before they decided how, where, and when. So many showed up, some from hundreds of miles away, which was no small thing those days.

They had a 2-day ceremony. The first day and night it was Linda and Paul at the high meadows edge, a small ritual fire, evoking God, the Saints and Sages, spiritual friends, angels, departed loved ones and ancestors, the spirits and Devas and Devis of the Wind, the Earth, the Sky and the Stars.

This is not a lurid romantic description: it was the step-by-step process they took in their ritual, evoking them all, God, avatars, saints, ages, gurus, spiritual friends, nature spirits – one by one. They had made two crude silver wedding rings consisting of two entwined strands wrapped into one and tied them together with a similarly twined rope. After placing the ring on each other’s finger, they burned the rope but left the symbolic tie to remain in the ether connecting them for all of time.

Linda’s Parents did not attend, but all Linda and Paul’s mutual friends did, and most of Paul’s even extended family, signing the handwritten vows they composed ourselves.

They honeymooned in their VW bus on the driveway of their Barboursville rented cabin while partiers reveled inside, recording a cassette of heartwarming if drunken celebration of them, their love, and life and love in general.

Although the local judge derided it as “a fad”, Linda and Paul had already obtained a marriage license, signed a lease, bought land, and the judge grudgingly made official their newly married combined name, RAF– from Raflo, -ORD from Bradford, becoming the new RAFORD moniker of the rest of their lives.

It was no fad to Linda and Paul, combining names. It seemed straightforward. The traditional ritual of the maiden changing her name looked clear enough, what that connoted and promoted. They sought instead to make it clear how they intended their relationship to be seen, and hopefully, to manifest.

Request password access

Linda started an Associate Degree RN program at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville.

Request password access

For the next two years, Paul labored on the land by day with any friend he could enlist but most often alone, working in the hospital at night. Linda and Paul spent many of their evenings square dancing and having communal get-togethers with the wonderful network of friends they had there. Two couples they knew and loved also strove to carve out homes and homesteads nearly by hand, and they exchanged labor and help to move their dreams along.

Brutal schedule, backbreaking dangerous work, living a subsistence lifestyle, but they were among the best years of their life. 

Paul swapped backbreaking labor with close neighbors and best friends Douglas and Patricia, who lived without water and electricity and needed help to rehab their ½ mile road; Linda wound up delivering three of their children. Linda and Paul also jaunted up to SW Pennsylvania where her college friend Dianne and her new husband Tom (who originally said Paul “ruined it” for him by getting married but changed his tune when he married!). They laid stone and worked on Tom’s hand-built house, and they would in turn come down to Linda and Paul’s site to do the same.