This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [1]
“The Vegetable Garden,” the sign at the end of our drive said, “Organically Grown,” with the vegetables in season listed beneath: carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini. Past a gravel parking lot, the driveway thinned to a grassy lane curving around the orchard and down a gentle slope to a wood-timbered stand with wet-pebble shelves full of fresh produce for sale. Customers and farmworkers came and went as the surrounding gardens ripened beneath the pale disk of midday sun and cicadas thrummed regular as your pulse. On the rise by an overarching ash tree sat our small house, its slanted roof and front eyes of windows looking across the greenhouse and gardens below. The only home I’d ever known.
Heidi and I were always outside, naked and barefoot, dancing on the blanket of apple blossoms, skipping along wooded paths, catching frogs at the pond, eating strawberries and peas from the vine, and running from the black twist of garter snakes in the grass. We lay in the shade under the ash tree, gazing up at the crown of leaves and listening to the sounds of the farm—birds calling, goats bleating, chattering of customers at the farm stand, and whispers of tree talk.
When you focused on the leaves fluttering in the dappled light, they vibrated and shimmered into one, becoming a million tiny particles. You felt a shift inside, and you began to vibrate too, on the same frequency as everything else. All secrets were there, all truths, all knowledge. You had to scan with your heart to find what you were seeking. It might not be spoken in words, it might be hidden in rhyme, in song, in images. You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you, made of particles, like you, come together in a different form. You loved it all as you loved yourself.
There are reasons why nothing lasts forever.
Papa says it was the little red boat Heidi must have carried down to the pond and set afloat. One of our farm apprentices said she was the kind of child who wasn’t afraid of anything. Another thought it was the black crow that hung around the farm that spring, a single crow being an omen of death in the family. Someone else suggested it was her lost caul, the rare birth sac myths say will protect against drowning. Others blamed it on our lifestyle—not a proper way to raise children.
Mama usually says it was the rain. She didn’t worry about us girls playing by the pond because it wasn’t that deep during the dry months of summer. But when it rained, the pond filled and turned black as the water caught in barrels under the eaves.
None of these things alone tells the whole story. Only in looking back can you see a pattern in the threads of life, interwoven with the events that would tear them asunder, and within that pattern lies the knowledge I’m seeking—the secret of how to live.
Chapter One
Family
Eliot with goat kid and Sue with Lissie, a few days after birth (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
For the first nine years of my life, Greenwood Farm was my little house in the big woods, located as long ago and far away up the coast of Maine as it was from mainstream America. Five hours from Boston, three from Portland, along winding roads that became successively narrower from Belfast to Bucksport to Penobscot, until they finally turned to dirt. If you were a bird, you could shorten the trip at Camden by cutting over the scatterings of fir-pointed islands on Penobscot Bay—North Haven, Butter Island, Great Spruce Head, Deer Isle. Viewed from above, the islands formed bright constellations in the dark sky of water, a mirror of the universe leading you back in time.
Just past Pond Island, you’d see the forested head of Cape Rosier reaching into the sea from the mainland and a sandy line of beach, beyond which a narrow road wound up through a blueberry field and disappeared into a dappled stretch of forest. A mile in, our land was surrounded