This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “It was like the jolly green giant had come in to help me make the garden,” Papa was quoted as saying.

  “Sue and Eliot have discovered that the dramatic increase in vegetable sales has brought them the headaches that go along with any small business,” Gumpert wrote. “So fast have they grown, Eliot says, that ‘pretty soon it’s going to be g-r-o-a-n.’ ” These headaches included the loss of garden time to tending the busy stand and the occasional spying customer looking in the windows of the farmhouse.

  “They wanted to see how the freaks live, I suppose,” Mama told Gumpert. She had afterward installed a “Private” sign on the front door to deter such curiosity in the future.

  “I feel in a way I’ve blown it here and I’ve let the place get too big,” Papa said in a moment of reflection. As much as he wanted to meet his goals for self-sufficiency, he was aware that the compromises were many. “I sometimes think that maybe I’d like to pick up in ten years and go someplace else and be even more self-sufficient.”

  “The right attitude for summer is to work for enjoyment, not for money, even if it means not earning enough for winter,” Mama wrote in her journal in opposition to the craziness of summer. “With money one’s goals become greedy (if you succeed) and angry (if you don’t).”

  We kept our money in a black metal money box that opened like a treasure chest; a key was tied to the handle with a piece of string so you could lock or unlock the lid. The metal handle hung with a comforting weight in my hand as I carried the box from the house to the farm stand in the morning. At the end of the day, I would bring the box back, feeling its weight heavier on my fingers from all the cash the customers gave us. Once I stopped in the privacy of what we called the Enchanted Asparagus Forest, with its overgrown wispy branches reaching taller than Papa, and opened the box with the little key. The half shelf on the top was full of coin compartments—pennies at one end, then nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars. The paper money sat under the coin shelf, bills rising up in piles of ones, fives, tens, and twenties. For some reason, I felt compelled to slip out one of the twenties and look at the pictures on it. It made a crisp and important sound when I folded it neatly and put it in my pocket.

  Mama noticed we were short that evening. She always checked the receipts against the earnings, leaving some bills for change and putting the rest under the couch.

  “Where could that twenty dollars have gone?” she said to Papa. I was the only option. At first I denied taking it, but finally I confessed and handed over the bill.

  “Lissie, you don’t need that money for anything,” Mama scolded.

  “I just wanted it,” I replied, chin dipped in apology. I must have sensed deep down that the value of money was greater to us than Mama and Papa were willing to admit.

  That October, as the world economy reeled from the 1973 oil embargo, Helen and Scott remained unperturbed, planning construction of their final stone home overlooking the cove. When Papa went down to look at the site, he found Scott bent over with age, methodically sawing down the smaller fir trees one by one with a handsaw to open up a path that would later become the driveway.

  “Get a chain saw, man,” Papa wanted to say, his recent success at the farm stand bringing with it a certain impatience for the confines of homesteading. But there was no teaching Scott new tricks at the age of ninety.

  By the close of business at the end of September, the farm stand had grossed $3,600 in vegetable sales from one and a quarter acres of cultivated land. Thanks in part to all the extra hands working the farm, and despite the dry weather, the 1973 earnings beat Papa’s projections by $400. It made little difference that the national average annual income of $12,000 was three times that. He’d finally made enough to support our family of four for the year without taking outside jobs.

  This success was nothing to rest on; Papa was already seeking the next challenge. Financial goals met, he wanted to pursue the dream that everyone could know the taste of delicious vegetables grown in their own garden, or on a small farm. A photographer from Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine had recently taken a handsome photo for the December cover of Papa at Hoffman’s Cove, harvesting seaweed for mulch. Papa’s hope was that more press like that could inspire people to grow their own food organically. He mentioned this aspiration to Scott as he helped him clear trees.

  Despite his old-fashioned ways, Scott surprised Papa by offering to give the Small Farm Research Association a grant to do research and visit organic farms in Europe and bring back successful organic techniques. Papa thanked Scott for the Nearings’ generosity and kindness, and felt ever more the responsibility to live up to their confidence. But when Papa told Mama of the offer, she felt a heaviness in her stomach. She was continuing to lose him, and their homesteading dream, to new goals.

  Like Thoreau during his hermitage at Walden, we did on occasion leave our remote cabin in the woods to eat at more civilized tables, and Christmas was generally the time to pay homage to our relatives. That winter, our first stop was Mama’s family in Westport, Massachusetts, for Nanna’s eightieth birthday party, where I enchanted relatives by saying to Nanna, “I know why we call you Great-Grandma. Because you’re so GREAT.”

  “The innocence of children,” Mama thought to herself, her family nudging in her the long-ago anxieties of her own childhood. The next stop, a five-hour drive from Westport in the bumpy old jeep, was Rumson, New Jersey, where Papa, too, would wrestle with his family’s opinions, but at least the energy crisis was lending some validity to his chosen way of life. Rumson was buzzing about the oil embargo that was driving up oil and gas prices and causing rationing, resulting in lines at the gas station. The accompanying stock market crash had also taken a bite out of Skates’s already slim investment portfolio. For the first time in years, Papa felt almost smug at the dinner table as his sister and mother complained about the hopeless state of the world’s energy problems, not to mention the ban on Christmas lights.

  “We simply prefer to do without such things,” Papa noted.

  “Say please and thank you, and don’t hold your fork overhand,” Skates admonished me in reply, trying to tame her grandchildren at the very least, her hair freshly coiffed in perfect white curls for our visit.

  “Smile for the picture,” she said when I got it right, wanting to capture our every move, but I was in an antiphoto phase, scowling and turning my head away.

  “Bootsie, if you just came to see me more,” Skates said, “I could teach your children some manners.”

  To this day I have a fear of incorrectly setting the table, which I would inevitably do at Skates’s house, lacking training in placing the shiny silver knives, spoons, and forks in the correct order around linen napkins, china plates, and crystal glasses. At home all we had were our carved wooden spoons and bowls. Thankfully, I didn’t yet have to attend the dreaded tennis lessons of later summers, when I’d show up at Skates’s private club in my not-white whites and socks pulled uncoolly to my knees, trying to pretend I hit yellow balls with a webbed racket every day of my life at the oldest manicured grass club in the nation.

  At Skates’s house everything was, “Careful, fragile!” as Mama always said. There were Skipper’s decorative navy swords on the walls, and wooden, glass, and ceramic birds of all kinds, flying, perching, and calling to our young hands—but, we soon found out, as easily broken as the white sofas and carpets were quickly stained.

  My favorite, and also least favorite, things about
visiting Skates were the bowls of nuts. They didn’t come in a shell like ones at home that we had to crack open with a metal cracker. Skates’s nuts were ready to eat, from china dishes shaped like fishes and silver bowls with lids and miniature spoons. There were large meaty Brazil nuts, round sweet macadamias that Mama loved, skinless peanuts. My favorites were the salted cashews and sugary pecans, the trick being to chew a pecan and a cashew on each side of the mouth and then mix them together, sweet and salty, on the tongue. When the nut bowls got empty, I knew Skates kept more in the bar, with its rows of sparkly glasses on mirrored shelves and many bottles for mixing grown-up drinks.

  “Lissie!” Mama said, finding me deep in the bar cabinet. “No more nuts. They’ll give you bad dreams. Come on, it’s time for bed.”

  As I lay in one of the guest rooms all to myself, sick from nuts, I felt giddy with the thrill of the beautiful things at Skates’s house. The downy toilet paper, the Q-tips that Skates said were for cleaning only the outer parts, not the inside, of your ears, the soft white-white towels monogrammed with her initials, the electric orange juicer, the dishwasher and trash compactor, the stationery and pens on her desk printed with her name, Mrs. Eliot W. Coleman.

  That night I never wanted to eat another nut again, but the next day I knew I would want more. Tomorrow the nuts would taste good again. Fancy things were like that, too. After a couple days, the allure of Skates’s possessions would wane, but the next time I came back to visit, after a year of not having them, they would be exciting again.

  A few weeks after Heidi’s first birthday in January, our neighbors Jean and Keith had their first child, Becca. On the way down the path in the woods to the Nearings’, I’d stop to check and see if she was old enough to play. It was on one of those visits, on a snowy February afternoon, that I found yet another friend. Jean was nursing Becca and Keith was sitting at the table by the front window, cutting up a butternut squash, when we saw a young stranger walking up the path from the Nearings’ in the gray afternoon light.

  “Hi, I’m Kent,” the sandy-haired boy said when Keith let him in. “I’m looking for Eliot Coleman.”

  We learned that Kent had heard about us from Doc Brainard, a professor at Springfield College, where Kent was a freshman. Kent read Living the Good Life and mentioned to Doc that he wanted to go work for the Nearings, but Doc, who owned a summer home in nearby Brooksville, told him he’d heard the Coleman farm was becoming the hipper place to go. Kent wrote a letter to Papa saying he was an eighteen-year-old student interested in farming and wanted to apprentice.

  “You’re welcome to come,” Papa wrote back. “But you should know farming’s no picnic.”

  The warning didn’t deter Kent, who decided to borrow his brother’s car and drive up to Maine during a winter break from school. He got stuck in a snowdrift on the hill just before the Nearings’ house, and the winter caretakers directed him up the path in the woods. At first he thought Keith and Jean’s was his destination.

  Wow, this is so cool, he thought to himself, seeing bearded Keith carving up the squash through the window. A secret world of hippies in the woods. It was quite a contrast to his life at Springfield College, where he was a clean-cut student on the gymnastics team.

  “This is Eliot’s daughter Melissa,” Keith said. “She can show you the way.”

  Dusk was falling as I led him up the trodden snowy path, feeling highly self-important leading this enthusiastic visitor to my home. My feet knew the turns by memory as the darkness of the forest closed around us in silence. When we emerged into the campground, I turned to see Kent right behind me, eyes shining. I explained where the gardens lay under the snow as he followed me down the back road to the house, the windows glowing with lantern light.

  Over dinner in wooden bowls, we drew Kent into our world—Mama’s vegetable soup, the warm cabin, Papa’s intellectual enthusiasm for gardening, Heidi toddling around, me showing off my dress-ups. After dinner, Papa took Kent out to the log cabin, where Susan and David happened to be staying for a short visit.

  “More cool hippies!” Kent thought when David answered the door with his long beard and Susan welcomed him with her trilling laugh from the loft above. David set Kent up in a sleeping bag on the floor and returned to the loft, where he proceeded to read aloud to Susan from Moby-Dick in a sonorous, slightly nasal voice. As he drifted off to sleep, Kent thought he’d arrived in heaven.

  The next day, David helped dig the VW out of the drift, and Kent went back to Springfield, hatching a plan to get out of summer gymnastics camp and return to become a hippie farm apprentice in the woods of Maine.

  “It was a psychedelic trip without the drugs,” Kent told his friends at school.

  “Yeowh! Yip. Werh!”

  That was the sound Papa made when he jumped into the icy ocean below our friends Mary and Dick’s house. Papa’s pale body had steamed through the darkness, down the hill to the water, and disappeared into a hole in the ice before quickly popping back up yipping. He climbed from the dark water and onto the icy shore, grabbing for his towel, then ran up the steps to the deck with wet hair stuck to his head, bright eyes, and red skin.

  “Yeowh,” he said, and tickled me just for fun. More people were coming out of the sauna onto the deck, and steaming naked bodies rose all around me. The sauna made us hot enough to stand outside in the winter with no clothes, and everyone was excited, running to dip in the ocean and coming alive from the heat and the cold water. Inside a wall of windows I could see Mama with Heidi and Mary and Dick’s grandchildren—my friend Nigel and his older sister Jennifer—sitting in the room next to the sauna. When we got cold, we went back into the sauna, where the air was warm and sweaty like a mitten and the cedar walls smelled of the trees on the path to our drinking spring. There were two rows of benches, the high one for hot-hot and the low one for medium-hot. Papa was on the hot one, talking in French to a petite woman with long brown hair. He spoke Spanish fluently but French not as well, and she was laughing at his accent, her breasts sweating in the dark heat.

  Between Papa and the Frenchwoman, the heat, the thrill of so many people, and the kids to play with, it was hard for me to think. I wanted to watch everyone jump in the water, to stay in the sauna, to play with the kids, to eat. My head hurt with the choices. I got up and ran out of the sauna to the deck.

  “At Mary and Dick’s, a porch is called a deck,” is what I wanted to tell Mama, running toward the glass door, where I could see her inside the light. Suddenly I was on my back, my forehead pounding, the bright orbs of goats’ eyes exploding in my head. When I opened my own eyes, a circle of penises and noses hung over me.

  “She ran into the glass window,” someone said.

  “Get a flashlight and shine it into her eyes,” someone called.

  “You’ll have a bump,” Papa said, bending over and touching my forehead with his warm hand. “Can you hear me?”

  I nodded. Someone was shining a flashlight in my eyes, so I closed them.

  “Should we take her to a doctor?” a voice asked.

  “She’ll be fine,” Papa said. “I don’t need a doctor to tell me that.”

  He carried me inside to look in my eyes in the light. Then Mama picked me up, holding me instead of Heidi for a change, and pretty soon I felt okay.

  “I’m hungry,” I said, and soon everyone walked over to the main house to eat. Nigel came and looked at my bump, coming close with his green eyes, ski-jump nose, and thick, sandy-haired b
owl cut.

  “You thought the window was a door.”

  “So.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “Shuddup.”

  By the time we headed home in the jeep, everyone had forgotten about my accident.

  “These saunas get better every time,” Papa said, humming to himself.

  “Yes,” Mama said.

  “Plus qu’hier et moins que demain,” Papa said. “More than yesterday and less than tomorrow.”

  “I do know that much French,” Mama said. Her voice was little.

  I drifted to sleep on the drive, my body spent from the heat of the sauna and collision with the window. When the jeep growled to a stop, there was the safe embrace of Papa’s arms lifting me onto his chest. As he carried me across the farm to the house, my eyes opened to see the stars wheeling overhead—Orion’s Belt, the Seven Sisters, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the thick band of the Milky Way—so bright against the darkness as the waning moon melted into a lump of butter in the black pan of sky.

  Again the snow melted, and the waters rose up from the earth.

  “I’m going to hire a backhoe to dig an irrigation pond,” Papa announced to Mama one morning, employing the short tone he used to hide discomfort. The summer before there’d been a nasty dry spell, forcing Papa and apprentices to carry water from the well to irrigate the gardens. Even the bicycle-powered water pump and healthy young apprentices were no match for the lack of rain, with helpers pedaling furiously for only a small return in water. If not for convincing the local volunteer fire truck to come irrigate the fields, we’d have lost our biggest moneymaking crop, the sweet corn, to drought.

  “People who say, ‘I would like to buy a farm,’ usually have in mind land rather than water,” the Nearings wrote in Continuing the Good Life. “Yet land without water is all but useless. Whether they are thinking of themselves and their family, their farm livestock, their growing crops or their own hour-to-hour and day-to-day needs, they must include water among their basic necessaries. In homesteading the two prime requisites are enough land and an abundance of unpolluted water.”