This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [50]
Snow fell in tiny pricks against Papa’s cheek, and the cold nipped his fingers as he rolled the tar paper onto the new roof. His heart seemed to beat too quickly in his chest, and he had a cold he couldn’t kick, despite gallons of rose-hip and raspberry juice. Even his old mantra, “How many son of a guns are this lucky?” held little comfort.
He tried to make sense of things in his mind. Health insurance, he believed, was on the table at every meal. In other words, the best way to deal with illness was to invest in prevention—eating a good diet that kept the body healthy. As with plants, Papa believed that if you became sick, it meant your body wasn’t getting what it needed. He’d read up on vitamins and minerals, learning which foods were highest in A, B, C, D, and minerals like calcium, magnesium, and zinc. He drank rose-hip juice for vitamin C, ate garlic and echinacea to build immunity, used peppermint and lemon balm tea to soothe the stomach, and used chamomile to calm the nerves, but perhaps all this wasn’t enough.
He knew that if B vitamins were lacking, it caused mood swings and other imbalances, but it seemed the bigger problem was stress, and there wasn’t much he could see to do about it. He never thought to question the vegetarian diet espoused by the Nearings. By Christmas, the roof and walls of the new addition had to be finished so he could break through the back wall of the house, creating a door to the new bedroom. And just in time.
Chapter Six
Water
Eliot, Heidi, Sue, and Lissie posing at the dinner table for visiting family (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
Each drop of water, we’re told, has existed in its myriad forms since the beginning of time on this planet. And water, as Scott liked to say, always finds a way to return to itself. It travels from cloud to mist to rain to ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and, finally, to the sea. From this water we are born.
At 1:35 a.m. on January 1, after six hours of easy labor at home and a final hour and a half of hard pushing at the hospital, Mama gasped as her second child slipped from its waters into the world. Papa roused a cheer, having supported her from first contraction through the last hard strains of labor, but there seemed to be a problem with the baby. Mama looked down to see a gray parcel—a baby’s shape, but not quite a baby, the head and shapes of arms and legs covered in a translucent gray membrane.
“En caul,” Dr. Brownlow said, unperturbed. The term was a reference to Hamlet, shortened in medical terminology from “enshrouded in a caul,” to refer to a baby born in the amniotic sac.
“Your waters didn’t break,” he explained, proceeding to remove what is sometimes called “the bag of waters” from around the child. Heidi emerged pink and perfect to gasp her first breaths of air, and become the first Maine baby of 1973.
A caul, I now know from research, is uncommon, appearing in fewer than one in a thousand births. Due to the rarity and strange appearance of the sac, legends have built up over the centuries, the most common being that a baby born en caul will never drown. As a result, cauls were once collected and preserved at birth and sold to sailors, who believed it would protect them from drowning at sea.
Upon weighing in at six pounds thirteen ounces, the baby was immediately placed on Mama’s breast to nurse, as Mama had requested, and the small mouth began to suckle instinctively. While at the hospital, Mama tried to imagine she was at home. She had asked that Dr. Brownlow give her no medication or episiotomy, no silver nitrate after the birth. Instead she drank one quart of raspberry leaf tea during labor and one immediately after. Papa even worked up his nerve to delicately tell the nurse that they’d like to take home the placenta. Dr. Brownlow was skeptical about these requests, but admitted it was one of the easiest births he’d attended.
Twelve hours later, as planned, Mama was ready to go home.