This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [6]
The name Melissa came from the book Look to the Mountain, for the pioneer woman who with her husband, Whit, settled in New Hampshire’s North Country, near Mount Chocorua, in the mid-1700s. As teenagers expecting a child with no money to buy land in town, they traveled by birch-bark canoe to the wilderness, where they claimed their one hundred settlement acres, built a home, and lived off the land.
As it turned out, Helen’s hesitance about children was not unwarranted. I arrived on the same day as a large delivery of strawberry plants, asparagus roots, and fruit trees that needed to be planted immediately, and one of the goats kidded a day later. The quiet of winter was over, and spring had arrived. Mama and Papa did the only thing they could—they embraced the challenge with all the energy and optimism of their youth.
After Papa called family from the Bucks Harbor pay phone to announce my arrival, Mama’s mother, father, and sister Marth came up to visit, driving from Lincoln, Massachusetts, to find life for the most part harmonious within the new pine cabin in the muddy clearing. Mama sat on the padded benches holding me in her lap, trying to act as if having a human baby at home was as normal as it was for a goat, but the harmony she worked so hard to foster began to unravel under the inquisition of her mother, Prill. Mama had called eight months earlier to say she was pregnant, and not to worry, but she was planning a home birth.
“Sue, dear, are you sure that’s safe?” Prill asked, her voice taking on a familiar pinched tone.
“My brothers and I were born at home,” my grandfather David said in the background.
“Shusshh.” Prill motioned to David, holding her hand over the receiver. “Your father was a doctor.”
In the 1960s, though we were only a century removed from a norm of home births, the old ways were branded just this side of witchcraft. To educate themselves, Mama and Papa read Natural Childbirth by Grantly Dick-Read, the British obstetrician who developed the modern concept of natural birthing. He believed that the social and emotional fear surrounding a hospital birth causes tension in a woman’s body, making the natural process unnecessarily difficult. Not surprisingly, his theories were met with resistance from the medical community, accustomed as it was to using drugs and other methods Dick-Read deemed unnecessary.
Papa liked his in-laws and encouraged Mama to give them the benefit of the doubt. “You’ve got a legacy of Yankee and Puritan skepticism behind you,” he said. “Not an easy thing to live with, but that’s what makes you so tough.” Three centuries earlier, Mama’s ancestor, the pilgrim Henry Samson, left his home in Henlow, Bedfordshire, England, as a teenager to seek his fortune on the Mayflower, landing on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrating America’s first Thanksgiving the following year. Since that time, the family had become less adventurous and more Puritan. In one memorable incident, Mama’s grandmother Nanna forbade Prill to elope with a handsome stranger from Kentucky. Nanna was domineering, “the Shark,” the family would whisper in later years, and she was not about to lose her only daughter to a southern man.
“We need to keep the family together,” Nanna told Prill with a hinting dismissal of Prill’s father, who was asked to leave after being discovered in bed with the maid. Attractive and well liked, Prill found a husband closer to home, one of the four Lawrence brothers she knew from summering in Westport Point, Massachusetts, near Cape Cod. The son of a Boston doctor, David went to day school at Belmont Hill and on to Harvard like his three brothers, once going on a double date with JFK. He and his brothers especially loved to ski, often hiking up Mount Washington in spring to compete in the annual Inferno, a downhill race on the steeps of Tuckerman Ravine.
“My dear, they were adventurous boys,” Prill would say. It was likely these hints of her father’s