This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [47]
“We work in the gardens—planting, harvesting, building stone walls—and cook our meals from the food we grow,” Susan told her mother. “I’m in heaven!”
“A farmer’s footsteps are the best fertilizer,” Papa told me as I rode on his shoulders while he walked around the garden at the end of the summer day, keeping tabs on the crops. My legs fit snugly between his jaw and shoulders, hands clasping his ears or across his forehead, his silvery hair tossing back under my chin as he held my feet with his callused hands.
“You can do anything you set your mind to, little one,” he said. “Look what we’ve done with this farm.”
We gazed out over the neat plots of vigorously growing plants. It was hard to imagine it had been forest only a few years earlier. Papa’s seemingly superhuman feats were bringing more and more reporters to our farm to take pictures and talk with him about the innovations he was making in his garden. Other people, it turned out, were eager to learn from him. He’d decided to follow the Nearings’ example and raise money for education and research, starting an organization called the Small Farm Research Association to provide a network of small farmers with the latest information about organic gardening.
“Don’t we have enough on our plate?” Mama asked, wary of the undertaking, complicating as it might the simple pleasures of homesteading. But Papa’s nature needed a challenge—he’d figured out how to homestead, and now he sought to take on agriculture. His goal that year was to be able to live off the summer sales of vegetables and the income from the research association so he could focus on the farm without taking outside jobs.
“Members receive copies of all our publications and are entitled to our agricultural advisory service,” he explained in the introduction to members. “All questions and letters will be answered on the basis of the best and most comprehensive information available.” A sponsoring membership was $20 per year; other memberships were “whatever you can afford.”
“Nothing is impossible,” Papa said, dreaming to himself, as we continued our rounds of the garden.
“But I can’t fly,” I’d giggle, coming up with games to lengthen our time together.
“You’re flying right now,” he said, tipping me this way and that, and suddenly I was. When you looked at it through Papa’s eyes, anything really was possible.
Papa knew it would take tremendous effort to make the farm profitable, but since the Wall Street Journal article, visitors wanted to stay and learn, and he realized the extra hands could help him meet his goals. Like the Nearings, he would teach the apprentices to garden and then put them to work building a new farm stand for the growing vegetable business. The problem was where to lodge all the eager workers. The Nearings didn’t like the expense of putting up helpers at the rental houses in Harborside, and sought to provide a better option.
Recently, they’d decided to sell a section of land to a young couple named Keith and Jean. The couple met in high school biology class in Ohio; both were from working-class families, Keith a tall, square-jawed football player, Jean a bookish type with long hair and glasses. After graduation, Keith spent two tours in Vietnam, and out of sorts with the world after combat, he began to talk about living off the land. They’d read Living the Good Life, and like Mama and Papa, took a land-hunting trip in their VW bus and stopped to visit the Nearings. Seeing potential in the young couple—and the lines of their hands—Helen offered them a deal similar to ours on the thirty acres that lay between us and the Nearing farm.
In the summer of 1972,