Choosing To Age In Community

Choosing To Age in Community: 3

This is the final portion of a story that begins here.

Christmas at Light Morning, 1992
Tom with Ron & Marlene and Lauren, Robert, Joyce

Prologue

Tom Hungerford was born in Winslow, Arizona in 1916, shortly after Arizona became the 48th state. He died at Light Morning at the dawn of the new millennium. Quite soon Tom will become one of the unremembered multitudes — a wave receding down a beach; a raindrop touching the surface of a lake; an autumn leaf falling from a family tree.

Yet in the brief interval between when Tom took his first breath and his last breath lies a span of some 30,000 days, each of them a tapestry woven of stories. Thus did J.R.R. Tolkien speak of a tree of tales in a forest of days.

In this concluding portion of Choosing To Age In Community we’ll see that Tom was deeply influenced by two books, The Razor’s Edge and The Comforter; that he loved a little cabin in the woods called Snowberry; and that a chance viewing of a movie freed Tom from a trauma he’d been carrying since World War II. Since he was always a traveling man, we’ll close with the story of how Tom ended his days at Snowberry, and finally traveled on to who knows where.

Choosing To Age in Community: 2

Thomas W. Hungerford

Born in Winslow, Arizona on April 29th, 1916
Died at Light Morning on May 25th, 2000

This is Part 2 of the story about Tom’s unusual life, which begins here.
The final portion of the story is posted here.

*Robert and Tom watching a gravel truck in 1995*, as *Rivendell,*
*Light Morning’s new community shelter, was being built.*

Choosing Light Morning

Robert–What did you do after your mother died, Tom? You were in your late 60s by then and you were trying to find an environment that was philosophically compatible with what your values were.

Tom—It didn’t have to be compatible. I was just looking for somebody who was working on themselves in a different sort of way. The only thing I could go back to myself was what I had found at the time of my divorce — the Edgar Cayce material and Joel Goldsmith’s Infinite Way. So I started looking in that direction.

Choosing To Age in Community: 1

Thomas W. Hungerford

Born in Winslow, Arizona on April 29th, 1916
Died at Light Morning on May 25th, 2000

Prologue

In the spring of 1976, a large white van pulled up to an old 8×10 granary shed which served as Light Morning’s community shelter. We were working outside, building a small woodshed out of salvaged materials. Dry firewood was a necessity. We used it for both heating and cooking.

Eight or nine people climbed out of the van, looked around, and introduced themselves. Almost all of them were our age, in their 20s and 30s. One of them, however, was 60. We wondered what had attracted someone our parents’ age to visit a remote rural commune in the Blue Ridge mountains of southwest Virginia.

That’s how we first met Tom Hungerford. During Tom’s many subsequent visits, and more fully after he moved here, we drew out portions of his remarkable story. Finally, on the eve of Tom’s 79th birthday in 1985, he and I sat down with a tape recorder and he reminisced about the circuitous path that led him to choose Light Morning as a place to both live and age.