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By Root 329 0

and other modern comforts. The lodge was owned by Carolyn Robinson, who with her husband, Ed, wrote The “Have More” Plan: A Little Land, a Lot of Living, a bestselling do-it-yourself home-gardening book published ten years before Living the Good Life, and credited with launching an exodus of the middle class from the city to the suburbs after World War II. Staying at the Robinsons’ was the glorified good life. Skates could eat meat, drink Scotch, and have a bathroom at night, then come see us during the day. Visiting her son was an adventure, just the way Papa liked it, but she was nonetheless relieved at the end of the trip to return to her own, much safer world.

The days grew short and cool as the endless light that had fueled us all summer lost minutes per day. Mama and Papa were busy as the squirrels, harvesting and putting away food. Some days Mama would sink under the weight of it all—the work of keeping life in order that never ended, the urgency to put away food to survive, and the burden of another being strapped to her body, nursing from her, needing her for everything.

Then there was the bucket of dirty cloth diapers, and no fresh ones. Dirty bowls in the sink and no clean ones, stains on her favorite shirt, a broken mason jar. Seaweed that needed to be hauled by the trailer load from the Nearing and Hoffman coves to cover the garden beds and provide potassium as it decomposed over the winter. Carrots and beets to be placed in sand in the root cellar, string beans to be canned in mason jars, winter squash to season on the patio, onions and garlic to braid and hang from the ceiling alongside spearmint, chamomile, and lemon verbena for tea and basil, rosemary, and thyme for seasoning. Meanwhile, Papa was occupied building a glass greenhouse on the front of the house to extend the growing season by bringing Skates’s temperate climate in New Jersey nine hours north to Maine.

When I cried, the noise must have vibrated inside Mama’s brain, sending an alert down each nerve ending in her body. An instinct in her bones responded to the sound, and she tried to soothe my cries with a mental checklist of generally successful actions. Nurse, change diaper, make sure I wasn’t too hot or cold. On bad days, when I cried about everything, whether she nursed or changed my diaper, the noise inside her brain was like a million mice gnawing away at the cords of her sanity.

If I could not be silenced, I imagine Mama set me down and covered her eyes with her hands for a moment, her forehead creasing. Behind her lids she saw her mother in the same gesture and her own mother’s hands falling from her face to reveal the panic in her eyes. She felt the rise of anger paralyze her jaw. Instead of letting the anger strike out, she pushed it away as her mother had done. Anger was ugly, Papa would not approve. Her eyes went flat, and she “checked out,” as she later came to call it. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back for hours.

Papa began to wonder if Mama had a split personality. One minute she was the strongest woman he knew, as in childbirth. She’d sensed just what to do—he’d been the helpless one. Other times she got weepy and depressed for seemingly no reason. “Take some B,” was his usual advice. From his reading, he suspected a vitamin deficiency as the cause of the moodiness, perhaps not enough vitamin B due to their vegetarian diet. Of vitamin B’s many variations, B12—which assists in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system—is not found in plants, leaving vegetarians deficient. The Nearings later admitted to getting B12 shots to supplement their diet, but did not widely discuss this fact, as it contradicted their claims of self-sufficiency. Later research has shown that the vegetarian diet is not as perfect as it then seemed, and may have indeed been responsible for Mama’s mood swings as well as Papa’s stress levels and eventual thyroid imbalance, an illness that would threaten the life they’d worked so hard to create.

Mama, however, generally resented Papa’s attempts to fix her with vitamins, saying she had B-rich brewer