This Life Is in Your Hands
Page 12
He knew that if B vitamins were lacking, it caused mood swings and other imbalances, but it seemed the bigger problem was stress, and there wasn’t much he could see to do about it. He never thought to question the vegetarian diet espoused by the Nearings. By Christmas, the roof and walls of the new addition had to be finished so he could break through the back wall of the house, creating a door to the new bedroom. And just in time.
Chapter Six
Water
Eliot, Heidi, Sue, and Lissie posing at the dinner table for visiting family (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Each drop of water, we’re told, has existed in its myriad forms since the beginning of time on this planet. And water, as Scott liked to say, always finds a way to return to itself. It travels from cloud to mist to rain to ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and, finally, to the sea. From this water we are born.
At 1:35 a.m. on January 1, after six hours of easy labor at home and a final hour and a half of hard pushing at the hospital, Mama gasped as her second child slipped from its waters into the world. Papa roused a cheer, having supported her from first contraction through the last hard strains of labor, but there seemed to be a problem with the baby. Mama looked down to see a gray parcel—a baby’s shape, but not quite a baby, the head and shapes of arms and legs covered in a translucent gray membrane.
“En caul,” Dr. Brownlow said, unperturbed. The term was a reference to Hamlet, shortened in medical terminology from “enshrouded in a caul,” to refer to a baby born in the amniotic sac.
“Your waters didn’t break,” he explained, proceeding to remove what is sometimes called “the bag of waters” from around the child. Heidi emerged pink and perfect to gasp her first breaths of air, and become the first Maine baby of 1973.
A caul, I now know from research, is uncommon, appearing in fewer than one in a thousand births. Due to the rarity and strange appearance of the sac, legends have built up over the centuries, the most common being that a baby born en caul will never drown. As a result, cauls were once collected and preserved at birth and sold to sailors, who believed it would protect them from drowning at sea.
Upon weighing in at six pounds thirteen ounces, the baby was immediately placed on Mama’s breast to nurse, as Mama had requested, and the small mouth began to suckle instinctively. While at the hospital, Mama tried to imagine she was at home. She had asked that Dr. Brownlow give her no medication or episiotomy, no silver nitrate after the birth. Instead she drank one quart of raspberry leaf tea during labor and one immediately after. Papa even worked up his nerve to delicately tell the nurse that they’d like to take home the placenta. Dr. Brownlow was skeptical about these requests, but admitted it was one of the easiest births he’d attended.
Twelve hours later, as planned, Mama was ready to go home. Papa bundled mother and child into the jeep, wrapping them in blankets against the drafts. They tried to think up a girl’s name over the roar of the engine. Mama was so sure the child was a boy, due to differences in the pregnancy, including more morning sickness and carrying lower, that all they’d prepared were boys’ names. Leif, after Leif Ericson, Starbuck after Coleman ancestors. David for Mama’s father. They even flirted with Eliot the Third, but dismissed the tradition of giving a son the father’s name, as Papa had been given his. Not until two days later did they decide on Heidi, a nickname for Adelheid from the book Heidi, about the orphan girl who finds a home and many adventures with her grandfather on a remote mountainside in the Swiss Alps.
It makes sense we’d have a girl, Papa thought to himself. Based on something he read and the amount of stress he’d been under that year, he theorized that the gender of a child was determined by which partner was under more stress during conception. If the man was more stressed, the child would be a girl; if the woman was more stressed, it would be a boy. This was nature’s way of looking out for us, he reasoned; either the man needed more females around to nurture him, or the woman needed more males around to take care of the hard work. It was one of Papa’s less enlightened theories, but at the time it made sense—he was certainly stressed, and perhaps something in him was also disappointed not to have a son.
They fetched me from the Nearings’ house, where they’d left me with Keith and Jean, and let me hold the tiny sleeping parcel in my arms. I felt a mixture of fear and then tenderness when she mewed and began to fuss. Mama took the bundle back and lifted her shirt to nurse. Another feeling came suddenly and inexplicably. Mine! I hovered next to Mama and clung to her arm.
“Mama,” I said, “Mia,” which was what I used to call nursing when I was little.
“You’re a big girl now,” Papa said. “Mama needs all the milk for the baby.”
I felt the blue egg rise from my belly. It didn’t come all the way up to my throat, but it didn’t go back down either. It lingered somewhere near my heart for a while.
“When will she be ready to play?” I pouted.
“Not yet, but we’ll get you a doll so you have your own baby to worry about,” Papa suggested. That evening while Heidi was sleeping, I was glad to go alone with Mama to milk the goats, as I had the night before. “I gave birth and didn’t even miss a milking, just like the she-goats do,” Mama bragged to Papa when she returned still high on postpartum hormones, with the full bucket.
Though it was not as exciting as I imagined it would be, I finally had a new sibling. Sadly, around that same time, an old friend was on his way out. Norman the Normal Dog spent most of the day on the padded benches, his back legs useless, moaning when he moved.
“It isn’t right to make him live in pain,” Papa said. “We’ll have to put the old guy to sleep.”
It didn’t sound so bad, to go to sleep, but I started to cry at the thought of Norm lying there still, his nose quiet on his paws.
“Papa, why does he have to go to sleep?” I sobbed.
“He’s really tired,” Papa said, his eyes as hard as they were about the billy goats.
Norm knew. He whimpered and licked my hand when we made him comfortable in a blanket. Papa wrapped it around Norm and lifted him in his arms to take him to the vet in the jeep. The bundle seemed so little.
“Don’t take him away,” I cried.
“Norm will come back to rest in the orchard with the billy goats,” Mama said, her nose reddening. I flopped down on the couch where the hairy imprint of Normie’s body in the cushion was still warm and dog-smelling and cried until I, too, felt like sleeping.
“Lissie, come rest with me and Heidi,” Mama called.
“No,” I sobbed. I didn’t want to go to sleep and not wake up. Whenever I thought of Norm “sleeping” in the orchard, the old lump rose again to my throat.
Before we knew it, the days lengthened and Papa was out in his rubber boots, turning the compost with a pitchfork and starting seedlings in the greenhouse.
“Know what?” I said to Papa. I’d just gotten in trouble for walking in his flats and hoped to make amends by helping to transplant seedlings.
“What’s that, kiddo?” Papa asked in his easy garden voice. My favorite thing in the world was to talk with Papa while helping him in the garden. There was something peaceful about his energy when he was working in the soil, and he spoke directly to me, making me feel like the smartest kid on earth. Even the toughest concepts made sense when Papa explained them because he let me figure them out for myself.
“Plants grow in compost and then turn back into compost when they die,” I said.
“Yup, that’s the magic of Mother Nature.” Papa nodded. “Dead plants turn into new plants.”
I thought about it for a little bit as Papa made dark wet circles with the watering can around the transplants.
“Papa,” I said. “What happens to dogs and people when they die?”
“They turn back into dirt, too,” Papa said. “They get buried in the ground and decompose.”
“So do dead people turn into new people?”
“Nobody knows for sure about reincarnation,” Papa said. “But if you pay attention to Mother Nature, it would make an awful lot of sense.”
Skates’s gardener, Bill, drove her up to visit her new granddaughter. They came from a world where the Paris Peace Accords in January of 1973 had brought an end to left-wing protests over U.S. involvement in Vietnam, while the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade the same month had initiated right-wing anger over legalized abortion. Skates stayed, as usual, at the guesthouse at Carolyn Robinson’s and came over to the farm during the day, bringing store-bought gifts like animal crackers in a colorful box with a red string handle that I coveted so much it made me cry.
“What’s wrong, dear?” Skates asked.
“Skates,” I said between sniffles, eyeing the animal graphics marching around the box, “we don’t eat dead animals.”
I was elated when Mama said not to worry, they weren’t real animals, and I could eat them. “Just this once,” she added, explaining patiently to Skates, “It might not be meat, but we don’t eat processed foods with white flour and white sugar, either. They aren’t good for you.”
I was normally the staunchest follower of these edicts, labeling people who ate meat as “other people,” the kind of people who lived in cities. When asked what I thought about cities, my reply was certain. “Bad,” I said.
“Poor Lissie will probably marry a butcher and move to Manhattan,” Papa joked, realizing our militant stance on diet had created in me a conflicted desire for what I couldn’t have.
“White-throat is back!” Mama wrote on April 19.
The mist settled over the farm, smelling of salt and wood smoke from the cookstove, as crows and seagulls circled and called above the thawing compost heaps. These scents and sounds of spring made my toes and ears tingle as if they were growing as fast as the seedlings on the windowsills. I wanted to take handfuls of earth and put it in my mouth the way Heidi would soon do, leaving a dark mustache around her lips.
Mama was both comforted and alarmed by the speedy growth of both of her offspring. Children made time rush by like a river in spring, swollen with runoff—you’d look back, and a year was gone. The feeling of my four-year-old body when Mama lifted me on her lap seemed suddenly alien to her, so much heavier than only a few weeks earlier. There was a solidity to me now, legs and arms long and skinny, only my child’s belly protruding. Just yesterday, it seemed, I’d been the size of Heidi.
“You have to keep them growing just as fast as they can.” Mama copied this quote from Lester Hazell’s Commonsense Childbirth into her journal. “Plant them when the temperature is right for maximum growth, have the soil fertile, and water them when they need it. A vegetable that stops growing for any reason is in trouble. The same is true of children.”
“Last night I realized how total Heidi’s dependence and helplessness has been when she for the first time ooched over to me to nurse,” Mama added, when Heidi was nearly five months old. “I felt she knew I was there and she could come to me instead of me picking her up when she cried. A big step!”
I had ideas of my own about the small creature that was my sister, who now took the portion of Mama’s energy and attention formerly belonging to me. Papa was busy as ever with his seedlings, and now Mama, too, had a seedling of her own. As with my plant siblings, Heidi had succeeded me as the center of the universe, so it seemed only natural that this new sprout should be put up for sale in the farm stand like the others. One morning while Mama was cooking lunch I occupied myself by wrapping a roll of the green twist ties used for bunching vegetables around Heidi’s tender little body as she slept, fastening the paper-covered wire snugly at her neck.
“Oh!” Mama exclaimed when she found us, her face not a bit as pleased as I’d imagined. “Not so tight around the neck!”
The terrible clutching in Mama’s chest at the fragility of her children, the fear that they could so easily perish, played seesaw with the unbidden postpartum feelings of exasperation during which she wished we would, in fact, perish and just leave her in peace. She’d struggled with the baby blues after my birth and was again navigating the ups and downs that can come with the hormonal readjustment.
“Yesterday it touched me deeply to see a young visitor’s concern and love for her baby,” she wrote. “Sometimes it moves me so much, I fear getting too closely involved, thinking it might break my heart.”
Papa always said he admired Mama’s strength during childbirth but found her a different person in the aftermath, weepy and prone to depression. Deep down, perhaps, Papa also missed the strength and devotion of his helpmate.
“I fear Eliot is working too hard again this year,” Mama wrote. “He looks tired and like he really needs rest.”
And then she crossed out her June 7 entry in a moment of frustrated rebellion:
“I have got to remember that my main and most important job is keeping the home together, doing the chores, kitchen work, washing our clothes, keeping Heidi and Liss happy, milking and caring for the goats, and in my spare time cutting firewood.”
I wonder now if one source of Papa’s stress began as early as when I came along, adding the extra work to the homesteading lifestyle that Helen had so aptly predicted. As long as Mama was carrying her formidable half, Papa had superhuman strength for his. But when the balance began to tip after the birth of a child, when Mama’s side of the seesaw sank lower, nearly touching the ground, he had to use his extra gear to get it back in balance. Mama’s alliance shifted, too. We became her primary focus as she struggled with the challenges of being a postpartum nursing mother—leaving less energy for Papa.
Papa was working twofold in order to reach his goal of turning a profit at the farm stand that summer. The projected income of $3,200 seemed an incredible sum, almost $1,000 more than last summer’s earnings, but one that would finally support our family for the year. Due to Mama’s reduced role, he began to rely all the more heavily on the help of apprentices, Susan and David, Brett, and anyone else he could find. With this help the new farm stand was completed, featuring a cedar-shingled hip roof and tiered shelves covered in wet pebbles to keep the displays of harvested vegetables moist and fresh for customers.
Mama was still counted on for her creative arrangements of carrots in sunbursts of orange, and beets, yellow squash, cauliflower, and lettuces coaxed into colorful landscapes. Braided onions and garlic hung from the rafters alongside herbs and dried flowers. She also printed up recipes to give customers ideas for preparing vegetables in new ways, including a yellow squash dish that was a farm lunch favorite:
Combine in a large skillet three sliced large yellow summer squash, 1/3 cup chopped celery, one finely grated onion, one finely chopped clove of garlic, two tablespoons oil, two tablespoons chopped parsley, one tablespoon honey, 1/2 teaspoon oregano and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and cook covered for 15 minutes or until squash is tender. Sprinkle with one tablespoon flour until liquid thickens and serve sprinkled with 1/4 cup sunflower seeds.
Thanks to free advertising from another article in the Wall Street Journal, the stand was drawing ever more summer folk from the surrounding towns of Blue Hill, Bar Harbor, Deer Isle, and beyond, and Papa saw in this success our financial security, albeit at the expense of our privacy.
“We’re almost over the hump,” Papa told David Gumpert when the reporter returned to do the follow-up article on us, exactly two years after the first. Gumpert’s original article had been so popular with readers—generating record numbers of letters—that the editors decided to send him back to check on our progress. “The idea was that the first five years would see the farm supporting us. I think we’ll do it,” Papa said. The second article noted we’d grossed $2,400 from the farm stand the previous year, up from $350 in 1971, and made significant additions in farmable acreage and buildings such as the woodshed (which cost $100 to build), root cellar, house addition ($300), and new farm stand.
“All of these changes, within the context of the Colemans’ existence, are vast,” Gumpert wrote, “but they haven’t been accomplished without the attendant headaches and sacrifices—one of these sacrifices has been abandoning from time to time the homesteader’s aim of shunning modern technology. Eliot, for example, finally decided that pulling all of the tree stumps out of his land by hand was too time-consuming, and last summer he hired the owner of a back hoe to pull out the stumps at a cost of $25.”