This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [36]
“I got married,” Mama told Grandma, the feeling of a high dive in her chest. Prill was speechless, possibly thinking of her own inability to run away with that long-ago Kentucky suitor. Mama hung up with a heavy face, but Papa tried to cheer her. “Just think how relieved your father is not to have to host and pay for an expensive wedding,” he joked. Then Papa called Skates, who asked if Sue was pregnant. When he said no, Skates was profuse in her disappointment at not being invited to the wedding of her only son, and not even getting a grandchild out of the deal. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “I’m just doing my own thing.” The big white wedding was another tradition he was happy to shed.
“To hell with it,” Papa said as they hit the road. “This is our life now.”
Spending the summer building kayaks and taking students down the Colorado and Green rivers, Papa once worried he had gotten Mama in over her head when they hit a section of rapids and she flipped over. He looked back upriver from his own kayak, helpless to do anything as she floated upside down toward some rocks that would surely ruin the fiberglass hull and might knock her unconscious. But when he looked again, she was back upright—she had rolled and steered clear of the rocks.
“Way to go!” he yelled, pumping his paddle in the air. There was one cool woman.
Upon returning to Franconia in the fall, Papa noticed an old hunting lodge on the school property, surrounded by open fields and forest, and asked the school if they could fix it up and live there. It was run-down, the outside covered in black tar paper, but he set to work creating a new interior of white pine walls with a sleeping loft and built-in bookshelves that he would emulate when building the cabin in Maine.
“I have a surprise for you,” Papa told Mama when she returned from class one day. He led her into the woods, where he’d built an A-frame with the obligatory quarter moon in the door.
“Our very first outhouse.”
“So romantic.” Mama laughed.
Mama took Papa’s rock-climbing class and studied Russian. They hiked and skied under the protective gaze of the Old Man in the Mountain, a rock profile that once perched on a cliff near Franconia Notch, and read Dr. Zhivago to each other. Mama tried her hand at pottery and became a fixture in the pottery studio, making cups and bowls for the cabin. You could say it was an alternative education; her pottery class even led a revolt against the administration. It was the 1960s, after all, and her spirit was coming alive in the atmosphere of freedom and self-expression.
“I finally feel a bit good at things,” she said. In Papa, Mama had found a kindred spirit to ease her old loneliness.
“It’s on Susie’s birthday that you can feel the light returning,” Papa liked to say, which of course made Mama smile. Mama’s birthday arrived on February 7, and with it the lengthening days, if not warmth. They celebrated with the Nearings, and again on Helen’s birthday two weeks later on February 23. “Had an excellent birthday party for Helen—food was superb and we all enjoyed ourselves through and through,” Mama wrote. “Scott looks very well.”
Soon after, Helen and Scott left for Europe on a lecture tour to promote their books. When the Nearings traveled in the winters, they paid Mama to reply to their mail, fill book orders, and look after their house. The money was welcome, and the work kept her occupied. The mail was often spread out on the table, letters lots, bills not many, as Mama sorted it into piles and I played in the low winter sun streaming through the south-facing windows. Most of the letters were from people who had read Living the Good Life and wanted to visit or had already visited during summer.
“We were so encouraged by our tour of your farm,” one said. “Now we’re looking for land to start our own homestead.”
Mama read this again and again; people were fleeing to the woods. Another thing she noticed was that some of the envelopes were