This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [54]
I was even given a job—selling potted flowers—and wore the patchwork apron Mama had made me the year before to match hers. Taking on Mama’s knack for display, I picked dahlias, marigolds, and snapdragons from the garden and stuck them into the pots that weren’t blooming yet so they looked more attractive to the customers.
Thanks to free advertising from another article in the Wall Street Journal, the stand was drawing ever more summer folk from the surrounding towns of Blue Hill, Bar Harbor, Deer Isle, and beyond, and Papa saw in this success our financial security, albeit at the expense of our privacy.
“We’re almost over the hump,” Papa told David Gumpert when the reporter returned to do the follow-up article on us, exactly two years after the first. Gumpert’s original article had been so popular with readers—generating record numbers of letters—that the editors decided to send him back to check on our progress. “The idea was that the first five years would see the farm supporting us. I think we’ll do it,” Papa said. The second article noted we’d grossed $2,400 from the farm stand the previous year, up from $350 in 1971, and made significant additions in farmable acreage and buildings such as the woodshed (which cost $100 to build), root cellar, house addition ($300), and new farm stand.
“All of these changes, within the context of the Colemans’ existence, are vast,” Gumpert wrote, “but they haven’t been accomplished without the attendant headaches and sacrifices—one of these sacrifices has been abandoning from time to time the homesteader’s aim of shunning modern technology. Eliot, for example, finally decided that pulling all of the tree stumps out of his land by hand was too time-consuming, and last summer he hired the owner of a back hoe to pull out the stumps at a cost of $25.”
“It was like the jolly green giant had come in to help me make the garden,” Papa was quoted as saying.
“Sue and Eliot have discovered that the dramatic increase in vegetable sales has brought them the headaches that go along with any small business,” Gumpert wrote. “So fast have they grown, Eliot says, that ‘pretty soon it’s going to be g-r-o-a-n.’ ” These headaches included the loss of garden time to tending the busy stand and the occasional spying customer looking in the windows of the farmhouse.
“They wanted to see how the freaks live, I suppose,” Mama told Gumpert. She had afterward installed a “Private” sign on the front door to deter such curiosity in the future.
“I feel in a way I’ve blown it here and I’ve let the place get too big,” Papa said in a moment of reflection. As much as he wanted to meet his goals for self-sufficiency, he was aware that the compromises were many. “I sometimes think that maybe I’d like to pick up in ten years and go someplace else and be even more self-sufficient.”
“The right attitude for summer is to work for enjoyment, not for money, even if it means not earning enough for winter,” Mama wrote in her journal in opposition to the craziness of summer. “With money one’s goals become greedy (if you succeed) and angry (if you don’t).”
We kept our money in a black metal money box that opened like a treasure chest; a key was tied to the handle with a piece of string so you could lock or unlock the lid. The metal handle hung with a comforting weight in my hand as I carried the box from the house to the farm stand in the morning. At the end of the day, I would bring the box back, feeling its weight heavier on my fingers from all the cash the customers gave us. Once I stopped in the privacy of what we called the Enchanted Asparagus Forest, with its overgrown wispy branches reaching taller than Papa, and opened the box with the little key. The half shelf on the top was full of coin compartments—pennies at one end, then nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars. The paper money sat under the coin shelf, bills rising up in piles of ones, fives,