This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [28]
“Gardening skill is something of a mystical thing,” Papa told Stanley for the newsletter, his thinking influenced, perhaps, by Helen’s Theosophical leanings. “In the garden, I empathize. As much as anything, I feel what needs to be done. That’s why it occurs to me that in another incarnation I must have been a gardener because working in the garden is just heaven for me, just right. It’s what I know I should be doing.”
Soon enough, Papa’s successes in the garden, and the sharing of these findings with others, would become far more vital to him than the less compelling—by comparison—demands of homesteading. While Mama relished the myriad tasks of the good life, Papa had found his true vocation in farming.
Chapter Three
Sustenance
Sue and Lissie in the strawberry patch (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellows of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries.
“Drove by the Holbrook orchard today,” Papa announced as he came in the door, just back from a trip to town in the jeep. “The apples are ready.”
“Time to go foraging?” Mama smiled from the stove, where she was busy canning vegetables. She reveled in the spark in Papa’s blue eyes, the backward sweep of his silver-tinged hair, and the wiry strength of his body, so utilitarian in form. His simple excitement over ripe apples ignited in her the love she felt deep in her soul for their life together. At its essence, theirs was as simple a relationship as that, united by this passion for their lifestyle, for good food, and for their mission of self-sufficiency. Food, from its procurement to its enjoyment, was the force that held them together.
“We’ll get apples tonight,” Papa said, and Mama’s eyes brightened in return.
Even during the first winter in the woods, before I was born, there was more than enough to eat. The root cellar was stocked with vegetables that Mama brought from their Franconia garden—carrots, potatoes, beets. Onions and garlic were braided together with the dry stems into chains to hang in the kitchen. They had the goats for milk, which Mama made into yogurt and cheese. The chickens provided eggs, and Mama sprouted alfalfa sprouts in mason jars topped with cheesecloth for salads. Not only did they find the vegetarian diet suited to their sensibilities, but it made their limited food choices simpler, and they enjoyed the shared commitment with their neighbors.
“We don’t eat anything that wiggles,” Helen liked to say.
She’d show fishhooks to visitors, lures with three-pronged hooks on them. “Would you want to bite this?” she’d ask, brandishing the hook at them. “Then why would you want a fish to do the same?”
“I became a vegetarian because life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans,” Scott wrote of his decision. “As a vegetarian I do the least possible harm to the least numbers of other living entities. Recognizing that all forms of life are worthy of respect, I disturb the life process as little as I can.”
Papa’s hesitance to harm animals came partially from a childhood memory of killing a squirrel with a BB gun and the feeling of regret over the surprising weight of the limp body in his hands. “When you have animals, you see their individuality and name them accordingly,” Papa told a visitor, adopting a dose of Scott’s self-righteousness. “How can you eat cranky old Tom or winsome young Will? We prefer not to. To provide milk and cheese we have goats, such attractive creatures. We feel perfectly healthy and vigorous as vegetarians. We feel good about it. Good in body and spirit. I’m perfectly sure the reason we