This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [60]
“Where are your shoes?” Mama was always asking whenever we had to go to town. Heidi and I looked at each other with empty stares, trying to remember the last time we’d seen them. Most likely they were growing daisies.
By the time the first strawberries were ripe, the soles of our feet had hardened into a thicker type of skin, like a callus. Tan mixed with dirt—hobbit feet. Now we could go anywhere. We walked on the hot tar roads in town, lost-shoe shoeless, on the rocks along the edge of the ocean, and on the prickly-needled forest floor of the mountain.
“Walking barefoot is like getting a whole-body massage every day,” Davora, one of the Nearings’ helpers, told us. Mama was sitting on the grass with her foot in Davora’s lap as Davora pressed on her heel. Davora was into reflexology, which she said was an ancient Chinese belief that the bottom of the foot is a map of the body. She had a chart in her book that showed the foot divided into different colored regions relating to specific organs.
“The Achilles tendon is for the reproductive glands,” she told Mama, and they smiled at each other and giggled.
Naked started as soon as the air was warm enough to get freckles. At first just shirts came off, revealing bellies white and rounded, arms skinny with a few permanent freckles that quickly multiplied on shoulders and noses and cheeks.
“Freckle face,” I said to Heidi.
“You.”
“No, you.”
“You.”
Soon the pants came off, left where we stepped out of them, as if a person had just vanished. Our legs were skinny and straight, with knobby knees, and the hairs on them made fine curves that glinted blond in the sun, not like Mama’s, which were dark on her calves.
“It’s because I shaved as a teenager,” she complained. “The hair always grows back thicker.”
Heidi and I loved that our skin was smooth and continuous all over, without rough patches of hair under the arms and between the legs like grown-ups. Pretty soon we didn’t even get dressed in the mornings. Our whole bodies brown and freckly, we wandered the gardens, eating things that were ripe, bending our knees to pee when we had to pee. We relished without embarrassment the thrilling shiver through the body when we were peeing and the deeply satisfying release of pooping.
“Not in the garden!” Papa yelled. He got especially mad if we pooped near the pick-your-own strawberries. “The kids are shitting all over the place,” he complained to Mama one day. “This has got to stop.”
“Put on your clothes,” Mama shouted after us, but Heidi and I didn’t listen. We ran off to hide in the Enchanted Asparagus Forest or graze through the rows of snap peas, reveling in the curve of our bellies and the knot of our belly buttons, the single line between our legs, the smooth round peaches of our buttocks. The shapes of our footprints in the dust.
Mama emerged from the farmhouse, hair pulled back under a bandanna, and set a stack of wooden bowls on a picnic table shaded by the ash tree. Hearing the slam of the screen, Heidi and I came running bare-bodied from the woods, the heat of the day warm on top of the head. I reached the house first and pulled a little cord by the door to make the lunch bell chime out across the clearing.
“Luunnccchhh,” a voice called in reply.
“La-uuuunch,” Papa echoed from somewhere.
Susan unfolded out of a crouch in the lettuce patch, where she was weeding in one of the peaked rice-picker hats Helen had brought back from China, her short bangs made sweaty by the band above her vibrant blue eyes. She and David were in charge of the handful of full-time apprentices that summer, overseeing the daily tasks of harvesting vegetables and running the stand, which was a steady success, with a record of nearly one hundred