This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [11]
“Ever thought of getting a chain saw?” the fellow asked innocently.
“We’d rather do without and work more slowly in peace,” Papa replied in his affably militant manner. “A power saw is an unnerving noise. It pollutes in every way, the vibrations and the stench it makes.”
“We prefer to use nature’s lawn mowers,” he added, pointing to the goats that ran free like a troupe of horned groundsmen, nibbling at the foliage, brambles, and trees to leave a nearly manicured, if a bit hoof-trodden and bark-chewn, landscape.
The sight of Papa tearing up stumps, struggling to grow food for our little family, assuaged Mama’s old fears. He was so full of vitality, an athlete in his prime, it seemed nothing could stop him. She wanted to climb inside his arms and stay there always, but the twelve- to sixteen-hour workdays and his part-time job left little time for that. The next year we would sell vegetables at the farm stand for income, but that first year Papa worked odd jobs for Helen and Scott and other townsfolk for $2.50 an hour, to bring in cash on top of his work at our farm. Mama’s day had multiple demands as well—hauling water for the pump sink in the kitchen, grinding grain with the hand grinder for baking bread, preparing meals, sewing and mending clothing, caring for me, and helping Papa while I napped.
“It was unremitting labor, the hardest time we had to go through,” Papa would later admit in an interview with Stanley Mills, a visiting friend of the Nearings who published a quarterly hand-typed newsletter detailing our back-to-the-land exploits. “If you’re going to homestead without private means you have to take it seriously,” he explained. “It would have helped to have more money so that I could have given all my time to homesteading instead of taking outside work. Heaven knows, there was enough to do on our place. When winter comes, there’s no going off to California. You have to stick it out and work much longer hours than the Nearing work formula suggests. We never had any doubts it was worth it, but at first we didn’t realize self-sufficiency means nineteenth-century primitivism.”
After the stumps on the half acre in front of the house were removed, Papa divided the area into twenty- by forty-foot plots, using a commonsense approach to small-scale agriculture. “We chose the size of the plots for their convenience,” he told Stanley. “It’s one fiftieth of an acre. Much information is available about needs and yields of land in terms of acres. In spreading lime, it’s common knowledge that acid soil requires at least two tons of lime an acre. To find out how much a twenty by forty plot requires, simply divide two tons by fifty. This amounts to eighty pounds, and lime comes in eighty-pound bags. So one bag each plot.” The lime served to decompose the vegetation and neutralize the acidity of the forest floor, thereby releasing the nitrogen that had been locked in by the acid and allowing for the growth of healthy soil bacteria. Next Papa tilled in compost and manure and staked out string in careful rows to transplant seedlings and seed the hardier crops.
Mama carried me on her chest or back with a cloth sling while she worked. After the gift boxes of Pampers from Mama’s parents ran out, she put me in plastic panties over safety-pinned cloth diapers that she washed by hand in the ocean and hung to dry in the sun. Since we might be outdoors for hours at a time, she would augment the cloth diapers with the same dried peat moss we used for toilet paper. It’s no wonder I would potty-train before the age of two. By midsummer I was able to hold my head