This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  The first snow fell while Papa worked beneath the protection of the new roof. “We can’t move in until it’s done, otherwise we’ll get used to it like this and never finish,” he told Mama. The interior walls took shape, with planed pine boards nailed vertically from floor to ceiling over the insulation. To the front of the side door sat the wood cookstove, surrounded by an L-shaped counter with an embedded stainless steel sink, a ship’s nautical water pump, and a water container below. A dining table made of varnished pine boards and crossed-log legs, with tree stumps for chairs, sat beneath the tall south-facing windows looking out under the overhanging roof. The far back corner walls were covered with bookshelves above built-in L-shaped benches that Mama would cover with maroon padded mats for a “sofa.” In the corner behind the kitchen, a raised sleeping loft over closet storage formed the bedroom space. The only appliances were a galvanized grain mill clamped to the kitchen counter, the radio, and kerosene lanterns.

  On a walk along the coast with the goats, Mama found a piece of driftwood that she carved and painted with their names, “Eliot and Sue Coleman,” and nailed to a post where the rutted path to the house left the public dirt road. By December 1, a little over a month after they started, Papa declared the house complete. As anticipated, the four-hundred-square-foot space felt like a mansion after the cramped camper, and the accumulating snow made its comforts all the more welcome.

  When Mama told Helen Nearing, her new neighbor and mentor, that she was pregnant, she expected congratulations from the woman who was becoming an alternative—if opinionated—mother figure.

  “You should have waited,” Helen clucked instead. “One needs time and energy to make a foundation as a homesteader. Children will use all that time and energy.” Mama recounted the incident to Papa, but passed it off by saying Helen probably didn’t value the joys of childbearing because she was not herself a mother.

  When the local doctor in Castine refused to do a home birth, Helen stepped up to suggest a midwife she knew named Eva Reich. The Reich home and laboratory, Orgonon, was located three hours west in Rangeley, Maine, but Eva lived with her husband on an organic farm in nearby Hancock. Eva’s father, Wilhelm Reich, the noted psychiatrist, scientist, and former associate of Sigmund Freud, gained notoriety through his experiments with a natural energy that he called orgone, but was put on trial by the FDA in the 1950s for his unorthodox methods and his attempt to collect this energy for healing purposes. The government, in an amazing act of censorship, had Reich’s orgone accumulators destroyed and many of his books burned, and Reich died soon after in prison. Eva later adapted her father’s theories in her work with children, using what she called butterfly touch therapy as a way to heal traumatized or colicky infants, but in the 1960s she was simply part of the small network of midwives supportive of home birth at a time when the establishment frowned on it. Papa planned to call Eva from the Nearings’ phone the minute Mama went into labor.

  “Let’s just hope she arrives in time,” Papa said.

  Four years earlier, when he was age twenty-six, a child of his own had been the furthest thing from Papa’s mind as he approached the buffet in Franconia College’s dining hall. A small college of three hundred students, it had a campus located on a ridge near Franconia Notch on the site of the once-grand Forest Hills Hotel, affectionately dubbed “the wedding cake.” Athletics included the fringe pursuits of kayaking and rock climbing, and students were required to sign up for work programs—cleaning buildings, serving meals, washing dishes, and other daily tasks.

  My mother, age twenty, was on meal duty that day. A slender sophomore in an embroidered Indian shirt, she had clear skin, square jaw, and hazel eyes set off by dark braids falling to her shoulders. Having dropped out of Lawrence University, where her parents had encouraged her to go, she’d decided instead to ski bum in Vermont at Mad River Glen. It was her first act of defiance, and she found reward in the carefree life of the mountains. Come summer she applied and was accepted to Franconia for fall, joining a community that shared her alternative inclinations. Behind the buffet, she glowed with newfound confidence that brought out her natural beauty. When she served Papa a scoop of mashed potatoes, their eyes met, and a spark of possibility ignited.

  Mama’s pupils widened in surprise, then contracted as if exposed to too much light. There was a confidence in Papa’s blue eyes and quiet smile that made her heart beat more quickly and set off a sudden flutter in her stomach. Everyone was in love with the handsome new graduate-assistant Spanish teacher; his wiry athleticism and passion for whatever he was doing—for life—drew people to him. He also happened to be partial to petite brunettes.

  “I’d like some more, please,” Papa said to Mama, returning for seconds. When he returned for thirds, he invited her to go camping. Back then, teacher-student relationships were commonplace, but Mama told herself she wasn’t about to become a cliché. She said she had a paper due. Papa found her wholesome yet shy manner intriguing. He asked again. Life reached out its hand, the bittersweet smell of fall in the air.

  “Yes,” Mama said.

  Mama’s water broke on the afternoon of April 9, and events unfolded according to plan—that is, until Eva’s car got stuck in the mud. She had to walk the last mile to the homestead, worrying she wouldn’t arrive in time. Mama was lying in the bed loft in darkness, the contractions rippling the bowl of her belly and clenching like fists between the bones of her hips. She breathed and sweated as Papa held her hand, assured by her confident grip. She’d been through birth before with the goats and knew it would happen on its own.

  “Someone’s here,” Papa said as Eva, a middle-aged woman with mellowing Germanic features and short gray hair, bustled in and gave Mama a shot of natural sedative to help with the contractions, then walked down to the Nearings’ to ask Scott to pull out her car. When she returned with Scott, he helped Papa boil water to sterilize the clamps and left them to wait. Around 1:30 a.m., after eight hours of labor, my slimy head crowned. Suddenly Eva was talking loudly to Papa. The umbilical cord was caught around my neck, and my face was turning blue. Eva quickly slipped a finger under and got the cord loose enough to cut. After the head, the rest of me slipped easily free, and I emerged sucking my thumb, apparently unperturbed that I’d almost strangled to death. Eva tied the rest of the cord into a knot, and Papa cut it from my belly button. A girl. They laid me on Mama’s chest, and I immediately began to nurse.

  Eva helped clean the loft but saved the placenta, suggesting Mama eat some to replenish the blood and nutrients lost during birth and help contract the uterus. Mama was not offended because she knew the mother goats ate their placentas, too, so she tried it raw, remembering it as tasting like liver. Papa was amazed at how quickly her belly shrank back to normal—after a week of nursing, she was her regular slender self.

  The name Melissa came from the book Look to the Mountain, for the pioneer woman who with her husband, Whit, settled in New Hampshire’s North Country, near Mount Chocorua, in the mid-1700s. As teenagers expecting a child with no money to buy land in town, they traveled by birch-bark canoe to the wilderness, where they claimed their one hundred settlement acres, built a home, and lived off the land.

  As it turned out, Helen’s hesitance about children was not unwarranted. I arrived on the same day as a large delivery of strawberry plants, asparagus roots, and fruit trees that needed to be planted immediately, and one of the goats kidded a day later. The quiet of winter was over, and spring had arrived. Mama and Papa did the only thing they could—they embraced the challenge with all the energy and optimism of their youth.

  After Papa called family from the Bucks Harbor pay phone to announce my arrival, Mama’s mother, father, and sister Marth came up to visit, driving from Lincoln, Massachusetts, to find life for the most part harmonious within the new pine cabin in the muddy clearing. Mama sat on the padded benches holding me in her lap, trying to act as if having a human baby at home was as normal a
s it was for a goat, but the harmony she worked so hard to foster began to unravel under the inquisition of her mother, Prill. Mama had called eight months earlier to say she was pregnant, and not to worry, but she was planning a home birth.

  “Sue, dear, are you sure that’s safe?” Prill asked, her voice taking on a familiar pinched tone.

  “My brothers and I were born at home,” my grandfather David said in the background.

  “Shusshh.” Prill motioned to David, holding her hand over the receiver. “Your father was a doctor.”

  In the 1960s, though we were only a century removed from a norm of home births, the old ways were branded just this side of witchcraft. To educate themselves, Mama and Papa read Natural Childbirth by Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who developed the modern concept of natural birthing. He believed that the social and emotional fear surrounding a hospital birth causes tension in a woman’s body, making the natural process unnecessarily difficult. Not surprisingly, his theories were met with resistance from the medical community, accustomed as it was to using drugs and other methods Dick-Read deemed unnecessary.

  Papa liked his in-laws and encouraged Mama to give them the benefit of the doubt. “You’ve got a legacy of Yankee and Puritan skepticism behind you,” he said. “Not an easy thing to live with, but that’s what makes you so tough.” Three centuries earlier, Mama’s ancestor, the pilgrim Henry Samson, left his home in Henlow, Bedfordshire, England, as a teenager to seek his fortune on the Mayflower, landing on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrating America’s first Thanksgiving the following year. Since that time, the family had become less adventurous and more Puritan. In one memorable incident, Mama’s grandmother Nanna forbade Prill to elope with a handsome stranger from Kentucky. Nanna was domineering, “the Shark,” the family would whisper in later years, and she was not about to lose her only daughter to a southern man.

  “We need to keep the family together,” Nanna told Prill with a hinting dismissal of Prill’s father, who was asked to leave after being discovered in bed with the maid. Attractive and well liked, Prill found a husband closer to home, one of the four Lawrence brothers she knew from summering in Westport Point, Massachusetts, near Cape Cod. The son of a Boston doctor, David went to day school at Belmont Hill and on to Harvard like his three brothers, once going on a double date with JFK. He and his brothers especially loved to ski, often hiking up Mount Washington in spring to compete in the annual Inferno, a downhill race on the steeps of Tuckerman Ravine.

  “My dear, they were adventurous boys,” Prill would say. It was likely these hints of her father’s adventurous spirit that Mama clung to in her own search for a fulfilling life, and found most appealing in Papa.

  As a child growing up in Nyack, New York, Mama preferred the summer months when the family packed the car and headed for the guest cottage next to Nanna’s house on Westport Point. In a style typical of the region, the weathered cedar-shake shingles of “the Wing” had faded in the salt air to a silvery gray that matched the stone walls of a once-thriving agricultural community. Mama loved the simpler life there, and the farms. What she didn’t love was the weight of Nanna’s often oppressive opinions, heavy on her family’s shoulders. Prill and David were afraid to stand up to Nanna and did whatever she wished, suppressing their emotions with classic Yankee stoicism.

  “I want to go to Putney,” Mama implored, referring to a hippie boarding school in the mountains of Vermont that her uncle had attended, and she never forgave her parents when they said they couldn’t afford it. They moved to the Boston suburb of Lincoln, where Mama attended high school and began to disappear. She was quiet and polite, but underneath there was something missing, some deep unmet expectation of happiness. She longed to spend more time sailing and skiing with her father, but his work as a bank vice president consumed him. Perhaps her expectations were too great, or perhaps her needs ran counter to what her family had to offer, but by the time she finished high school, she was already looking down alternative paths for fulfillment. When she met Papa, she glimpsed the possibility of a different kind of life, and she jumped for it.

  Mama’s jaw tightened as her family surrounded her, filling the small space of the house. She handed me to her mother, who sat down in the rocking chair where Mama liked to nurse me. When I arched my head back in my grandmother’s arms, thinking it was time to nurse, Prill quickly handed me back to Mama. Prill had grown up during the transition from the discipline method of child rearing to what many termed the permissive methods of Dr. Spock. Her own parenting style had been a little of both, but in Mama’s mind everything she did was wrong, even things like referring to bowel movements as “BMs” and pee as “tinkle.”

  Then as Mama lifted her shirt to nurse, my grandfather got up and left the room in discomfort. “I’d like to breast-feed our children,” Mama had declared to Papa during her pregnancy, and he heartily agreed. In 1969, more than 75 percent of babies were fed commercial milk formulas. As a result of women’s staying in the workforce in the wake of World War II and the well-financed marketing of formula companies, baby formula had become the norm and breast-feeding nearly taboo.

  “The German chemist Justus von Liebig developed the first commercial milk formula,” Papa explained to his in-laws. “He’s also known as the father of the chemical fertilizer industry. That’s what convinced me our children should be nursed.” As in the garden, Papa wasn’t about to trust a chemical substitute to take the place of nature. Though they may have been somewhat skeptical about Papa’s passionate explanations, Prill and David were charmed by his enthusiasm and tried to ease into their role as grandparents. Mama, however, remained in a constant state of defense, unable to relax until her family packed up to return to Massachusetts.

  Three years earlier in Franconia, it was a certain book that set my parents on this unexpected course of their lives together. Thinking of that book, I imagine it as an old genie’s lamp waiting in that dimly lit health food store. Its magic was of the kind books possess when they come into our lives at the right moment to show us what we need to learn. As my parents opened its worn pages, their future was released.

  Not long after they met, Papa told Mama he wanted to get a yogurt maker. Mama suggested a trip to Hatch’s—she was looking for a grain mill to grind flour. In the 1960s, you couldn’t easily buy whole wheat flour or real yogurt—you had to make it yourself—and Hatch’s was one of only a few natural food stores in the southern New Hampshire–Vermont area where you could find these weird sorts of things.

  “There are almonds and cashews in bulk,” Mama said enthusiastically as they drove over to St. Johnsbury on a late fall day. “And coconut peanut butter, which is almost better than mixing tahini and honey. And an energy drink of tomato and lemon juice mixed with brewer’s yeast and liver powder. What a boost!”

  “Hot damn,” Papa said.

  Health food united Papa and Mama as much as, if not more than, their love of the outdoors. “How are the nuts and berries today?” more traditional friends liked to tease. Papa came to whole foods as an athlete needing to maximize his nutritional intake, but Mama’s interest in healthy eating started as a way to keep her weight down. An aunt had given her Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit when she was a pudgy teenager, and she adopted the whole and raw foods advocated in the book to find the slender figure she would keep for the rest of her life.

  Mama and Papa shared a growing anger when shopping at supermarkets filled with rows upon rows of packaged and canned processed foods, or when seeking something other than fast food on a road trip. Why did it have to be so hard to find good, healthy foods that nourished the body rather than depleting it? Before the industrial revolution and the world wars whole and fresh vegetables, meats, and grains had been more commonplace, but the factories and economic growth of the 1940s and ’50s supported processed and canned food and the convenience of the supermarket. By the 1960s, bulk foods were all but outlawed in favor of prepared mea
ls and mixes—“empty food,” some called it. As one of Papa’s favorite cartoons stated, in reference to the neutron bomb: “It’s called the junk food bomb. It destroys populations while leaving profits intact.”

  Advertising had done its job—overworked women wanted to buy their food ready-made instead of slaving in the kitchen like their mothers. The problem was, no one yet knew the effects these “easy” foods would wreak on the health of the nation.

  As Mama and Papa entered the white clapboard New England–style house at 8 Pine Street, a bell rang to alert the owners, who lived above the store. Hatch’s was founded by former missionaries to India who had become missionaries of health food. Mama and Papa were greeted by the scents of candle wax and sage, and by the Hatches’ son David, who wore a one-piece blue jumpsuit, his long hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail. His wife, Carol, was breast-feeding her baby in a chair by the cash register.

  “Welcome, welcome,” David called, puttering nearby as they shopped.

  There were bins of dried peas, kidney beans, lentils, brown rice, spices, and, of course, wheat groats to grind into flour and cultures to make yogurt. In the back of the store was also a lending library with books about natural living. Papa was drawn to one on healthy eating called Faith, Love and Seaweed by the father of Olympian swimmer Murray Rose about the diet and mind-set that won the gold in 1960, and the less useful Breatharianism, about living on air. A month later they were back, not for the liver drink, which Papa found unpalatable, but for the bulk food and books.

  “You’ve got to check out this one,” David told them, pointing out Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, the 1954 edition, with a print on the cover of a green wheelbarrow behind a row of maple trees. The pages were well worn.

  “This is right on,” Papa said, reading the book aloud to Mama back at the cabin they shared in Franconia. In Living the Good Life, the Nearings told the story of leaving New York City in 1932 to become homesteaders in Vermont—turning an old farm into their primary livelihood, building a stone house, maintaining an organic garden, and living off the sale of syrup from the maple grove on their property.