This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [116]
As he turned from the cape onto the paved road heading south, the snow on the pavement fluffed up into the engine and stalled it out.
“Son of a gun,” he muttered, fingers burning with cold as he fiddled under the hood by the side of the road. The memories came to him then, faint but determined, of rising at dawn to cut branches from the trees for emergency firewood, fixing the rototiller by kerosene lantern on a spring evening, Mama’s singing along the wooded paths as she carried water from the spring, patching the flat tire on the trailer to get manure to the gardens, building the addition in the cold of December before Heidi was born, and the warm little bodies of his children sitting in his lap as he seeded the flats for spring. Through clenched teeth, he said the words to himself, then, under his breath, his old mantra, though the words held little comfort.
“Just how many sons of a gun are lucky enough to be doing what I’m doing right now?”
Only later would he realize that he could still trust in his findings—gleaned by trial and error—that anything really is possible if you set your mind to it, that attention to detail is the best teacher, and that if you’re not getting anywhere, it’s time to change course. Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he’d found his purpose in life—to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us.
I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return.
As if there hadn’t been enough sacrifices of late, when Papa called Gerry to say he’d reached Topsfield, she told him her father had just died of a heart attack. She’d gone out for a jog on New Year’s Day and returned to find him on the floor at the bottom of the basement stairs, surrounded by broken flower pots and EMTs. She and her mother could do no more than stand aside as the supine form of father and husband was wheeled out the front door.
At the sound of Papa’s voice, Gerry felt an inexplicable urge to get pregnant—to meet death with new life. Papa’s voice dangled the cord of a rescue rope, and she reached out to grab it. After her father’s funeral, she packed up her bag and boarded a bus—with her widowed mother’s blessing—bound for Massachusetts.
Mama wrote to former apprentices Pam and Paul asking for help. They arrived in a red Datsun pickup with their new little baby, Mariah. The gardens no longer teemed with naked bodies, and music rarely drifted from the campground at night. There were only Pam and Paul in the log cabin, and the occasional visitor who hadn’t heard the party was over. In Papa’s absence the air became thinner, like the first time he left for Europe. It left us fatigued, as if climbing at high altitude.
I thought of Papa chopping wood out by the woodshed on the day he left, clouds of his breath rising in the cold air, or pushing the rototiller into the dark of evening to get the gardens ready for summer, and I knew we were lost without him. It was by the force of his will alone that we had lasted as long as we did. His was the strength the pioneers had possessed, but the world had become an easier place since then, and people didn’t need to work so hard to survive, so they didn’t. It was insanity to do so.
When I went down the path to catch the school bus in the mornings, I waited on the Nearings’ former lunch patio for my new friend John to come out and join me. John’s family had moved up from the city to rent the Nearings’ old house and try homesteading. As we walked to the bus together, John said I was weird, so he would teach me how to be normal. These are the things he taught me:
Boys are better than girls.
Gilligan’s Island is better than The Brady Bunch.
Oreos are better than Chips Ahoy.
Cowboys are better than Indians.
Mom and Dad are better than