This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [123]
What Mama never talked about with anyone is when Heidi returned to the house that day, after I wouldn’t let her up the woodshed ladder to play with me. Mama, too, sent her away again, but Heidi kept coming back. She begged to come inside the house, perhaps sensing Mama’s confusion and wanting to be near to make sure she was okay.
“Let me in,” Heidi pleaded, standing on the stone step outside the latched screen door, the distinct outline of her hand silhouetted against the mesh. “I want to come in.”
“No, I’m trying to clean,” Mama replied.
“I wanna play,” Heidi begged.
What Mama did next is something any parent might have done in a hurried moment and then forgotten about when it had no consequences.
“Well, then, go float some boats,” Mama said, tossing the red wooden tugboat, the one that didn’t float right, out the door to Heidi.
I hover now with compassion near Mama as she breathed in and out on the zafu, trying to erase her words and their results. Her secret only grew more terrible there in the darkness where she kept it hidden. After she left the farm, she would wander from Arizona to North Carolina to California, finally settling in San Francisco, where she lived in a sequence of one-room apartments. She often dreamed of the birds, she would tell me, the white-throat, the swallows and scarlet tanagers soaring over the farm, and comforted herself by imagining that Heidi flew with them now. But it would not be until recently, when she realized I was afraid I was the one responsible for Heidi’s death, that she shared her words from that humid July day with me. Exposed to light, they are simply what they are—innocent words with terrible consequences—but in claiming them she took responsibility for the guilt we’ve all carried, and with that action it has at last begun to fade.
Fall painted the leaves with its cool fingers as daddy longlegs gathered under logs in the chilly evenings, entwining their gangly legs to keep warm. There was again the smell of wood smoke, of loss, as I walked through the woods on the path to the bus. New England’s seasons are so exact, you can feel a chill in the air on the first day of fall, as if Mother Nature had a calendar in her pocket. Ask me how a world ends, and I’ll say it’s like the end of summer. The cold seems to arrive with a bang, not a whimper, but looking back, you realize cool tendrils had begun slipping into the warmth long before, you just didn’t want to notice.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Mama was always saying, about the vegetables not getting harvested and canned or me not having shoes that fitted and forgetting my lunch for school. “Oh shit.”
As the 1979 energy crisis waned in the following year, so too would the accompanying desire to live more simply. By the 1980s oil glut, jobs and opportunities would become so plentiful in the cities that few could resist the pull to return. Many families, like us, would succumb to divorce or separation, and as Helen had long ago predicted, those who stayed put were generally the homesteaders without children. Soon the back-to-the-land movement would be a distant memory to all but the most stalwart. In the mid-1980s, I would even neglect to mention to teachers and friends that I’d ever been part of something so odd. It wasn’t until the 1990s that organic gardening rose from the derision of hippie stigma to find its place in a changing world. Papa’s ideas from the 1970s were suddenly being touted by those very same people who’d said he was full of shit. And slowly a more balanced off-the-grid-with-Internet lifestyle has developed. But for Mama there were only memories of what she’d lost.
The one thing Mama could bring herself to do—between the never-ending, face-reddening headstands and prone-seated meditation, the marijuana for her nerves, the long mornings in bed with Shiva—was read a particular story