This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [55]
Mama noticed we were short that evening. She always checked the receipts against the earnings, leaving some bills for change and putting the rest under the couch.
“Where could that twenty dollars have gone?” she said to Papa. I was the only option. At first I denied taking it, but finally I confessed and handed over the bill.
“Lissie, you don’t need that money for anything,” Mama scolded.
“I just wanted it,” I replied, chin dipped in apology. I must have sensed deep down that the value of money was greater to us than Mama and Papa were willing to admit.
That October, as the world economy reeled from the 1973 oil embargo, Helen and Scott remained unperturbed, planning construction of their final stone home overlooking the cove. When Papa went down to look at the site, he found Scott bent over with age, methodically sawing down the smaller fir trees one by one with a handsaw to open up a path that would later become the driveway.
“Get a chain saw, man,” Papa wanted to say, his recent success at the farm stand bringing with it a certain impatience for the confines of homesteading. But there was no teaching Scott new tricks at the age of ninety.
By the close of business at the end of September, the farm stand had grossed $3,600 in vegetable sales from one and a quarter acres of cultivated land. Thanks in part to all the extra hands working the farm, and despite the dry weather, the 1973 earnings beat Papa’s projections by $400. It made little difference that the national average annual income of $12,000 was three times that. He’d finally made enough to support our family of four for the year without taking outside jobs.
This success was nothing to rest on; Papa was already seeking the next challenge. Financial goals met, he wanted to pursue the dream that everyone could know the taste of delicious vegetables grown in their own garden, or on a small farm. A photographer from Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine had recently taken a handsome photo for the December cover of Papa at Hoffman’s Cove, harvesting seaweed for mulch. Papa’s hope was that more press like that could inspire people to grow their own food organically. He mentioned this aspiration to Scott as he helped him clear trees.
Despite his old-fashioned ways, Scott surprised Papa by offering to give the Small Farm Research Association a grant to do research and visit organic farms in Europe and bring back successful organic techniques. Papa thanked Scott for the Nearings’ generosity and kindness, and felt ever more the responsibility to live up to their confidence. But when Papa told Mama of the offer, she felt a heaviness in her stomach. She was continuing to lose him, and their homesteading dream, to new goals.
Like Thoreau during his hermitage at Walden, we did on occasion leave our remote cabin in the woods to eat at more civilized tables, and Christmas was generally the time to pay homage to our relatives. That winter, our first stop was Mama’s family in Westport, Massachusetts, for Nanna’s eightieth birthday party, where I enchanted relatives by saying to Nanna, “I know why we call you Great-Grandma. Because you’re so GREAT.”
“The innocence of children,” Mama thought to herself, her family nudging in her the long-ago anxieties of her own childhood. The next stop, a five-hour drive from Westport in the bumpy old jeep, was Rumson, New Jersey, where Papa, too, would wrestle with his family’s opinions, but at least the energy crisis was lending some validity to his chosen way of life. Rumson was buzzing about the oil embargo that was driving up oil and gas prices and causing rationing, resulting in lines at the gas station. The accompanying stock market crash had also taken a bite out of Skates’s already slim investment portfolio. For the first time in years, Papa felt almost smug at the dinner table as his sister and mother complained about the hopeless