This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [39]
“Most beautiful day we have had in weeks,” Mama noted in her journal. “Still eating apples stored since last fall in the root cellar. They remain crisp and juicy: Northern Spies and Golden Russets.”
As the white flowers faded, everything turned green. Grass thickened to a vibrant carpet as clumps of chives returned to the herb garden, where they’d been planted the previous year. Segmented stems of horsetails sprang from low, damp areas, and green tongues of wild lily of the valley caught the light around the edges. Spruce and fir branches put forth electric green bristles, and baby fiddleheads brightened to an edible chartreuse that Mama snapped off and brought home to sauté with butter for lunch.
While Papa seeded flats with me in his lap and readied the farm for planting, Mama carried water from the drinking spring, milked the goats, cooked meals, and sewed or mended clothes on her foot-powered treadle Singer sewing machine. She brought out cotton shirts from storage, put away sweaters, washed the windows, swept, dusted, and mopped the floors. Spring cleaning helped get the winter doldrums out of her mind, too.
“I used to be a troubled person—not able to find myself nor find a way of life that suited me,” Mama wrote on April 9, thinking back to her difficult adolescence. “I believe I grew up in a fear of life setting and this I somehow think drains creative energies (anti-life being negative leading to destructive energy). Then I came here, found homesteading and made myself well.”
Papa was in the garden tilling, spreading compost, and transplanting as I trundled after him in my favorite red-checkered Marna coat, as I called it, handmade by Mama’s sister, Aunt Marth, of a blanket “borrowed” from the ski lift at Mad River Glen. The once-poor soil was now rich and dark brown from compost when Papa dug into it with a trowel to transplant seedlings. We put our noses close to inhale the fresh scent of spring.
“That’s the smell of possibility,” Papa said.
Mama watched us through the front windows as she sat with her journal, hoping to capture her feelings of contentment and well-being. “Realized for the first time in my life that I am truly happy,” she added to her previous post. “Happy to be with Eliot and to have had Melissa and to be living here with the Nearings as neighbors. My life has become meaningful after years of confusion and chaos.”
We received the message from the Wall Street Journal on a rainy day in May of 1971. The newspaper my grandfather Skipper read as he rode the train to his job as a stockbroker in New York City wanted to do a story on us. Mama’s initial thrill turned to apprehension.
“This is exactly the type of thing we wanted to escape,” she said. Papa nodded, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The article could be used, he thought, to spread the word about a better way of living. Furthermore, his Wall Street Journal–reading family and friends in New Jersey thought he was a financially destitute hippie. A story in their paper of choice might prove otherwise. It could show that material wealth was not the only wealth.
The reporter, David Gumpert, might as well have been covering a story in a third-world country. A staff writer at the Boston office, he’d been captivated by an article about us in the Maine Times and proposed a story on this new interest in going “back to the land.” Sales of the 1970 edition of Living the Good Life had reached nearly 50,000 copies, compared to only 10,000 for the previous edition, and The Whole Earth Catalog and Rodale’s Prevention magazine were giving voice to this growing subculture of environmentalists, natural foodies, and organic farming advocates. The problem was, there was no easy way to get ahold of us. Gumpert finally succeeded in contacting Papa through Bucks Harbor Market’s phone, and left the city to enter our world for three days, sleeping in the guest camper/soon-to-be goat house and