This Life Is in Your Hands
Page 29
“Where’s Mama?” I asked, arms crossed over my chest, bangs heavy on my forehead. Pam and Paul moved slowly toward me, as if trying to catch a goat. Paul rested his hands on both knees so his eyes were at my level, his face boy-cute beneath a dark bit of beard.
“Your mother has left on a trip with Shiva,” he said. “She took Clara but couldn’t bring you. I’m trying to get ahold of your father.”
“I want to stay here,” I said, bracing my feet. They were bare and brown below my knobby goat knees sticking out of my shorts. “Stubborn as a goat,” Mama always said. “Stubborn as a goat with horns.”
“Well, of course you do,” Paul said.
He looked over my head at Pam. Rocked on his heels.
If I were to copy a quote for that moment into my journal, as Mama used to do, it would be this:
We live from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and at each point we are a little different. If there is no change, this is the open door to death. Life is a progression. It is not a standing still. It is either a plus or a minus.
—Scott Nearing
Two days later, unable to locate Papa by phone, Paul drove me in his red pickup to school. Brooksville Elementary was a low, white, many-windowed building. I walked through the double doors, down the empty hall, to the classroom shared by the third and fourth grades. From the safe island of my desk, I practiced holding my breath—one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand—in case I needed to swim a long distance underwater to safety.
“Attention, please,” Mrs. Clifford said, and cleared her throat before taking attendance. When she called my name, I raised my hand and said, “Here.” She looked at me over the moons of her glasses and made a note on her list. “Such a sad little girl,” said the thought bubble over her head.
Once everyone was accounted for, we stood with right hands on our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in perfect Maineglish. “Ah pledge-a-lee-gence to the flag, of-the-Un-i-ted-States-of-A-mer-i-cer, and to the-re-pub-lick-far-which-it-stands, one nay-ton un-dah God, in-vis-i-ble, with lib-er-dy and jus-tice-fa-all.”
My mind drifted and wandered, following the trail of the never-ending story Frank used to tell me the spring of Mama’s first leaving.
“Why does the story have no end?” I asked Frank that summer.
“Because the universe is a big circle,” he said, nonsensically, it seemed. “With a circle, you always come back to the beginning and start over.”
He drew a circle in the air with his finger, starting at the tip of my nose and coming back around to the tip of my nose.
“See,” he said as my eyes crossed on his finger.
Frank said everyone knew this was true. For example, he quoted the poet T. S. Eliot, who, he said, went to Milton Academy and Harvard like him: “And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end.” That didn’t make much sense either, but made me think of how Papa said his classmates used to josh, “T. S., Eliot,” meaning “Tough Shit, Eliot,” when things weren’t going his way.
I pictured Papa as he looked the last time I saw him, across the space under the ash tree by the woodshed, lifting firewood in his arms to bring into the house before saying good-bye. His breath came out in clouds in the early-morning air. My throat tightened, knowing he was going to leave. I wanted to run out to tell him how much I loved him and to hug him, but I didn’t do any of those things because I was mad he was leaving. Now I wished I’d held on to Papa; his certainty was the one thing I could trust.
“Melissa.”
Mrs. Clifford’s voice came from far away.
“Melissa,” she said again. “Your father is here.”
I looked up, and the room narrowed into focus. Papa was standing outside the window of the classroom door, his silvering hair and blue eyes catching the light. The other kids were silent as I slid out of my desk and followed Mrs. Clifford through the door for good. In a few years, Papa would be granted custody of Clara and me, and he and Gerry would raise us, with our new little brother Ian, in Massachusetts. Our homes, from there to Texas, Vermont, and eventually back in Maine, would never be home like that little house in the woods, but they would always be safe.
Outside the door of the classroom, Papa opened his arms to pull me into a hug. I realized I’d been holding my breath. As it released, I began to cry.
Epilogue
The author’s twin daughters, Emily and Heidi (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
The last time I saw Helen, she read my hands, of course. Scott stopped eating nearly ten years earlier, taking his last breath eighteen days after his hundredth birthday, and in the coming fall, Helen would crash her car along the narrow roads of the cape and pass on to her next life, too. I’d returned to the farm for the summer of 1995, lost in the way of those living at home in their twenties, seeking something in the past that might mend me. Papa had returned five years earlier to find the orchard alive and the fertile earth from the 1970s waiting for him beneath tall grass, overgrown alders, and creeping rose-hip hedges. The ragged clearing was making way—with the help of my new stepmother, Barbara—for the greenhouses, gardens, and modern house of Four Season Farm, eventually featuring farm stand and apprentices anew.
It was the first time I’d lived on the cape since childhood and I was on a pilgrimage with my sister Clara—seven years younger, but an old soul—to see the woman who’d been a symbolic, if distant, grandmother to us.
By then, the Nearings’ legacy had attained the aura of curious oddity, a throwback to the youthful rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s, and as with most gurus, they’d revealed their fallibility like the rest of us. One of our neighbors liked to say that the Welcome sign at the Nearings’ should instead read, “Scott’s dead, Helen’s in Florida. Get a life.” But when Helen bemoaned her dwindling followers, Papa told her she simply needed to live a little longer, evidence pointing to the return to the land as a cyclical urge in history.
The small community the Nearings founded not only survived but was thriving anew, the land on either side of us peopled with former neighbors and apprentices, now with electricity, running water, phones, and Internet, though an outhouse or two for good measure. Every Wednesday, to this day, the neighbors come together amicably, and often quite raucously, for a sauna and potluck, hosted by each in turn. Other apprentices and visitors, too, are spread across the country, many with their own farms, carrying on the dream in their own manner.
Clara and I found Helen in the greenhouse, age ninety-one, active as ever, onion-skin hands still in constant motion, pruning and tying up tomato plants, continuing to work even as she took stock of us, these few remaining children from the past. As a way of greeting, Helen reached out and clasped my hand in a leathery grasp so similar to the one in her old kitchen twenty years earlier. There was still the dusky smell of books in her short granite hair, the puffiness under her eyes and chin as she looked down, the clucking of her tongue on the roof of her mouth.
“How old are you?” she asked, pressing the pad of my thumb.
“Twenty-six,” I said, feeling quite ancient.
“Young,” she said. “Young for your years. At that age I’d already met Scott-o, was already started on my life. What are you doing now?”
“Not sure,” I confessed, lacking the skill to bullshit someone who would surely see right through it.
“Well, at least you’re in possession of yourself.” She nodded and gave me back my hand, again leaving the reading undone.
So she read Clara’s instead, commenting, I think, that her career line was rather weak. Clara rolled her eyes, resigned to her current fate of joblessness. She would go on to have a family and successful organic farm of her own, but that was still years away.
Helen just clucked her tongue.
“Your life is only just begun,” she said to Clara. “The lines of the han
d can grow and change, you know.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant then, but I do now.
The lines of our hands, and of our lives, are not predetermined and final, but can change as we do. We are, in fact, already creating what we will become.
Now when my sister and I go to Cape Rosier to visit Papa—Gumpa to the grandkids—we might go with our husbands, Robbie and Eric. My young twin daughters, Heidi and Emily, and Clara’s boys, Bode and Hayden, run out to the garden to find their grandfather with his shock of white hair and eyes still as bright blue as theirs. They pull candy carrots from the greenhouse to eat on the spot, and help him plant hopeful rows of seedlings in the dark soil, as the white-throat calls out spring’s return.
“We were young and strong and we were running against the wind,” Papa says of the homesteading years, now that much of the past has composted to foster the present. Over the years, Papa’s books on organic gardening and his enduring enthusiasm for healthy soil have inspired many people of all ages and backgrounds, no less his own family, to grow their own vegetables in ways that feed the soil, as well. Even Skates’s conservative relatives are known to admit, “Eliot turned out all right.”
Mama, too, has made her way to peace. Grana Sue, as the kids call her, is often found sewing squares of fabric into elaborate quilts, “in the Batcave,” as my step-dad Tom refers to the studio in their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the halo from the lamp, she reaches out with a sure hand, arranging the swatches in combinations that ease her soul, trying perhaps—like me—to unite the pieces of the past into a pattern that makes sense of things. Here, this print reminds her of a shirt she had then, with a blue fleur-de-lis pattern; this one of a dress she sewed for Heidi; here, the cloth she used for the chambray Russian peasant’s shirts that Papa so loved. As the pieces come together, she thinks of her grandchildren accepting her so trustingly, and realizes that with the release of her secret guilt she can learn to love like them again, without fear of loss.
“Time present and time past,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “are both perhaps present in time future.” But in the end, all we really have is the present.
It was Pam who recently reminded me of the day before Heidi’s passing, when Heidi and I had been playing and Heidi fell in the pond. Pam, who heard the crying, came and brought Heidi up to the house, but never said anything to Mama, not wanting to add to her worries, and so the incident was forgotten. I gasped at the recollection. Those two days had long ago blended in my mind, leaving me thinking I’d been there at the pond, that we’d fought and I’d splashed her and she died. That everything that happened was my fault. Now I, too, have been set free.
“This is the use of memory,” Eliot also said. “For liberation— From the future as well as the past.”
Someone once told me that as raindrops fall toward the surface of a pond, the water actually rises up to meet the drops—a magnetic attraction of sorts—welcoming the rain back into itself. When I think of my sister Heidi that day, reaching for her little boat, I can see the water rising up with joy to meet her, to take her back, and I no longer begrudge it. Joy is what remains.
Acknowledgments
This book is offered in gratitude to so many people. To my parents, Eliot and Sue, who chose to live as they did, and Helen and Scott Nearing, who inspired them. To my sisters Heidi and Clara; my stepmothers Gerry and Barbara; my stepfather Tom; my half brother Ian and my stepbrother Chris; my mothers-in-law Jean and Barb and my father-in-law Dotson; my siblings-in-law Robbie, Kelly, Kim, Michelle, and Rich; and my nephews Bode and Hayden. And to Prill and David, Skates and Skipper, Eunie, Nell, Lyn and Lucky, Martha, and John. It was my wonderful husband, Eric, who said this was the book I needed to write and gave me the support to do so, and our twin daughters, Heidi and Emily, whose birth pushed me to understand my own childhood in order to better celebrate theirs. They are lucky indeed to have five grandmas, three grandpas, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Milton Academy and the University of Vermont did their best to civilize me and send me out into the world. Ian Baldwin, an old family friend, was an early voice of encouragement on this book, along with the teacher and editor Scott Sutherland, and the members of my Friday morning writers’ group, Jen Hazard, Cathy Holley, Caroline Kurrus, Victoria Scanlan Stefanakos, and Lindsay Sterling, plus readers Catharine MacLaren and Audrey Wong and cheerleaders Basha Burwell and Peter Behrens. I could not have written this memoir without the memories of the many friends, apprentices, and Akiwabas my family has known over the years, in order of appearance: Mary, Susan and Carl, Susan and David, Keith and Jean, Chip, Brett, Kent, Michèle and Frank, Greg, Michael, Anner, Sandy and Larry, Pam and Paul, Rob, Peter and Jeannie, Mark and Mia, and the memory of Stan. Also Tony Stout and David Gumpert.
L.L.Bean provided gainful employment when I was writing this book. A lucky coincidence introduced me to the lovely editor and writer Bridie Clark, who referred me to Rob Weisbach, the dear wise agent who helped turn a draft into a publishable book and found it a great home with Jonathan Burnham at HarperCollins. Everyone at Harper has been exceptional: my editor, Gail Winston, with her gentle and always insightful touch; Jason Sack with his eternal patience; designers Christine Van Bree, Archie Ferguson, and Eric Butler; and Beth Silfin in legal, Leah Wasielewski in marketing, and Katherine Beitner and Tina Andreadis in publicity.
Thank you all.
About the Author
As a freelance writer, Melissa Coleman has covered health, gardening, food, art, and travel. She lives in Freeport, Maine, with her husband and twin daughters.
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Credits
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
Cover design by Christine Van Bree
Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability, or as they were told to the author by people who were present. Others have read the manuscript and confirmed its rendering of events. Some names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved.
THIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS. Copyright © 2011 by Melissa Coleman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce from the following:
“Stupidity Street” by Ralph Hodgson. © 2010 Bryn Mawr College Library.
Map copyright © 1989 Jane Crosen
EPub Edition April 2011 ISBN: 9780062087355
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coleman, Melissa.
This life is in your hands: one dream, sixty acres, and a family undone / Melissa Coleman. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-195832-8
1. Coleman, Melissa—Childhood and youth. 2. Coleman, Melissa—Family. 3. Coleman, Eliot, 1938– 4. Coleman, Sue, 1945– 5. Loss (Psychology)—Case studies. 6. Children—Maine—Penobscot Bay Region—Death. 7. Drowning—Maine—Penobscot Bay Region. 8. Penobscot Bay Region (Me.)—Biography. 9. Farm life—Maine—Penobscot Bay Region. 10. Penobscot Bay Region (Me.)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
CT275.C6857A3 2011
974.1’3043092—dc22
[B] 2010024942
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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