This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [127]
“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