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FREDERICKSBURG TRANSPLANT GETTING HER GREENS Laura Shepherd practices what she preaches
She's one of a kind, that Laura Shepherd
Date published: 9/24/2006
By SUSAN SCOTT NEAL
VIDEO: See video of Laura in the garden.
EVERYBODY DOWNTOWN KNOWS LAURA SHEPHERD.
She's that back-to-nature gal who pulls up in a big orange pickup, leaps out, crams on a floppy straw hat, grabs her tools, then works in the yard like no woman you've ever seen, pullin' weeds, diggin' holes, sawin' dead wood and draggin' branches.
She's at Hyperion knocking back coffee every morning at 8 and seems to know everybody.
You DO know, she's that gal with the long frizzy braids, always got those earth shoes on and dirt under her fingernails. She's that downtown hippie chick.
Yeah, that's Laura Shepherd.
She is one of the city's freest spirits, a single woman in her 40s who listens to her own inner voice.
It tells her to tread lightly on this earth.
So she lives simply, frugally and respectfully in a society dominated by extravagance, excess and disregard.
In the 1960s and '70s, Shepherd would have had many compatriots among the nation's ardent environmentalists and flower children who embraced the back-to-nature movement.
These days, Shepherd has friends and sympathetic spirits in the artsy, organic crowd and in other groups spanning the economic spectrum. She is, says one who knows her well, "one of a kind."
She wears old clothes and garden clogs, she twists her hair every morning into two long ropes, hay-colored and thick as hemp.
She shuns jewelry, cosmetics, creams, lotions, perfumes, antibacterial soap, sunscreen. She does not pluck or shave.
She doesn't eat meat, fast food or anything with chemicals or preservatives.
She doesn't own a TV, much less a VCR, DVD player or computer. She has a telephone but no answering machine.
She has never had a checking account, never had a credit card. Everything she has ever bought was paid for with cash, including her much-loved 1983 Ford truck, for which she paid $700.
"Sometimes people ask me if I'm independently wealthy, and I just laugh," she said during an interview at Hyperion. "No, I'm not. I just don't have any debt, and I don't have many needs."
Hitting pay dirt
Shepherd has been on the downtown scene since her days at Mary Washington College in the early 1980s.
Read more stories about Fredericksburg
Date published: 9/24/2006
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