This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [2]
On a morning in early April of 1969, as my future parents were clearing brush under the bare crown of the ash tree next to their new home, two sparrows circled once, twice, then alighted on a branch to announce their arrival with a familiar melody of clicks and twseets. Surprised by the song, Mama raised her head to spot the diminutive brown birds with patches of white at the throat. “The white-throat,” she exclaimed, an armload of brush resting on the pronounced swell of her belly. She’d always loved sparrows best—so joyous in their simplicity. “They mate for life and come back every year to the same place to build a nest,” she added, having checked it in her Peterson’s before.
“A sure sign of spring,” Papa replied, giving a low whistle through his teeth before returning with renewed vigor to his work. Easter would fall that Sunday, though they’d lost track of such dates by then—spring was a resurrection with or without a holiday.
It was not the spring of hyacinth, lily of the valley, and drunken bumblebees, but the New England spring that comes just before. Mud season. The last pockets of snow melted away as rain fell from the sky in steady gray sheets, filling hollows and ruts with dark puddles. Ice crystals released their hold on soil that sank into a primordial muck.
“Son of a gun,” Papa said. “The ruts in the driveway are up to my knee.” The white VW truck wallowed like a pig when he revved up and tried to drive through. Sometimes he made it, sometimes he didn’t.
“Looks like we’d be having the baby at home even if we didn’t want to,” he said after one unsuccessful attempt.
Mama’s belly was the perfect half round of the wooden bread-mixing bowl, a defined mound under her favorite anorak with the fur-trimmed hood. It appeared before her when she exited the outhouse and entered the door of the farmhouse. Her face was round too, glowing like the moon. Standing at the kitchen counter preparing lunch, she looked normal from behind, but when Papa came and put his arms around her, they could rest on the curve of her belly as his hands searched for the shape of a foot or leg.
“There, Eliot, there again,” Mama said. “Movement.”
His larger hand pressed next to hers, waiting for another kick.
“Yes, I felt it,” he said. “I really did that time.”
“It could be any day now,” Mama said. She felt something changing inside, a slowing down and getting ready.
Scientists say my waiting self could already hear the chirp of Mama’s voice, the ha-has of Papa’s laughter, the thump of feet and the click of Normie-dog’s paws on the wooden floor of the farmhouse. There would have been the shush of sweeping, the crack-shatter of Papa chopping kindling, an explosion of firewood dropped into the bin, the crunch of gravel outside, goats bleating as they waited to be milked, water splashing at the spring. Most of all, I would have felt the constant sound of Mama’s heart beating, a steady drumbeat on a rawhide surface, blood rushing through valves into arteries and capillaries, keeping me alive. A new home awaited, one Mama and Papa had worked hard to make safe from what they saw as the dangers of the outside world.
Six months earlier, on October 21, 1968, my parents had moved from Franconia College in New Hampshire to a makeshift camper on the sixty wooded acres Helen and Scott Nearing sold them for $2,000. There was no mail service, no telephone or electrical wires, no plumbing. All of that ended a mile down the road at the Nearings’. Mail was picked up at the post office, the one public building in Harborside, a tiny town located four miles from the homestead along the western side of Cape Rosier’s coast. Calls were made fifteen minutes away on a pay phone at a store off the cape in Bucks Harbor, also home to the famous Condon’s Garage, where Sal gets a spark plug as condolence for her lost tooth in the children’s book One Morning in Maine.
“Cape Rosier looks like the profile of a moose’s head.” Mama pointed out to Papa on the map. Holbrook Island