This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [49]
“The doors of the bus keep freezing shut at night from the moisture of my breathing,” he told Papa one morning. “I had to break a window to get out.”
“What we need is a cabin,” Papa said. He suggested that Brett put his carpentry skills to work building himself a place to stay. The Nearings put up some cash, and Brett scavenged pine boards for the 250-square-foot interior while tearing down a house in Harborside. He used driftwood he found on the beach for the porch and covered the A-frame roof in sheets of cast-off galvanized steel. But by the time the cabin was completed, Brett had to leave it behind, having accepted an invitation to sail down the coast on the Nathaniel Bowditch.
Meanwhile Susan, the Nearings’ star apprentice, was looking for a place to stay that fall, and took up residence in the new abode. One of the visitors passing through caught her notice. A recent Dartmouth College grad, David had a long brown Walt Whitman beard and sparkling blue eyes. His quiet and methodical soul was immediately drawn to the playfulness of Susan’s carefree spirit. Little did they know at the time that they would eventually marry and have kids; they are still together, farming organically, to this day. David slept on the porch of the cabin, and they talked late into the night. When it got too cold for camping, he invited Susan to work with him on a farm near Hanover, New Hampshire, for the winter, and they made plans to return to the cape the following summer and help manage our growing workforce.
Papa was busy building that December, too, finishing an addition to the farmhouse so we would have room for our growing family. As the cold of December closed around us, he spent the short days and into the night adding a twenty-by-eighteen-foot room behind the house.
“You need to take it easy,” Mama said, already in bed with third-trimester fatigue, when he came in from pounding nails in the dark.
“I have to get the roof up before the snow,” he replied, eyes closing the minute he lay down. Once the roof was up, he said he was pushing hard to finish before the baby came, but Mama thought there was more to it than that. When Papa was tired, he became more obsessive about work. It was as if overworking set off an alarm in his mind telling him he needed to work more. Instead of taking care of himself, he pushed harder.
“I’ve always had an extra gear I can count on when things get tough,” Papa explained to Mama over breakfast, trying to ease her fears. During his years as a mountaineer, when the climb seemed the hardest and he wanted to give up, something in his body said, “Don’t stop now or you’ll die,” and the adrenaline kicked in and carried him through to safety.
“It seems you’ve shifted into that gear permanently,” Mama replied.
Mama worried about Papa as she worried about her father and his heart. While Grandpa was sensitive to life, its stresses taking their toll on his health, Papa had seemed the opposite of that, so vital and invincible, but now Papa, too, was weakening, showing signs of being human. Sometimes Mama’s fears were not a problem to be solved, but simply an emotion that needed release. If they weren’t, her fears ballooned inside and became bigger than all else. Mama longed to relax into Papa’s arms, slip into the cave created by the touch of skin on skin. When Papa resisted her need, she tried to hold on more tightly, but already he was slipping away from her grasp. Putting on his coat. Going to work.
“Wait, Eliot,” she called. When he turned back, his eyes were hard, and words failed her. She didn’t know how to ask for what she