• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As a child growing up in Nyack, New York, Mama preferred the summer months when the family packed the car and headed for the guest cottage next to Nanna’s house on Westport Point. In a style typical of the region, the weathered cedar-shake shingles of “the Wing” had faded in the salt air to a silvery gray that matched the stone walls of a once-thriving agricultural community. Mama loved the simpler life there, and the farms. What she didn’t love was the weight of Nanna’s often oppressive opinions, heavy on her family’s shoulders. Prill and David were afraid to stand up to Nanna and did whatever she wished, suppressing their emotions with classic Yankee stoicism.

“I want to go to Putney,” Mama implored, referring to a hippie boarding school in the mountains of Vermont that her uncle had attended, and she never forgave her parents when they said they couldn’t afford it. They moved to the Boston suburb of Lincoln, where Mama attended high school and began to disappear. She was quiet and polite, but underneath there was something missing, some deep unmet expectation of happiness. She longed to spend more time sailing and skiing with her father, but his work as a bank vice president consumed him. Perhaps her expectations were too great, or perhaps her needs ran counter to what her family had to offer, but by the time she finished high school, she was already looking down alternative paths for fulfillment. When she met Papa, she glimpsed the possibility of a different kind of life, and she jumped for it.

Mama’s jaw tightened as her family surrounded her, filling the small space of the house. She handed me to her mother, who sat down in the rocking chair where Mama liked to nurse me. When I arched my head back in my grandmother’s arms, thinking it was time to nurse, Prill quickly handed me back to Mama. Prill had grown up during the transition from the discipline method of child rearing to what many termed the permissive methods of Dr. Spock. Her own parenting style had been a little of both, but in Mama’s mind everything she did was wrong, even things like referring to bowel movements as “BMs” and pee as “tinkle.”

Then as Mama lifted her shirt to nurse, my grandfather got up and left the room in discomfort. “I’d like to breast-feed our children,” Mama had declared to Papa during her pregnancy, and he heartily agreed. In 1969, more than 75 percent of babies were fed commercial milk formulas. As a result of women’s staying in the workforce in the wake of World War II and the well-financed marketing of formula companies, baby formula had become the norm and breast-feeding nearly taboo.

“The German chemist Justus von Liebig developed the first commercial milk formula,” Papa explained to his in-laws. “He’s also known as the father of the chemical fertilizer industry. That’s what convinced me our children should be nursed.” As in the garden, Papa wasn’t about to trust a chemical substitute to take the place of nature. Though they may have been somewhat skeptical about Papa’s passionate explanations, Prill and David were charmed by his enthusiasm and tried to ease into their role as grandparents. Mama, however, remained in a constant state of defense, unable to relax until her family packed up to return to Massachusetts.

Three years earlier in Franconia, it was a certain book that set my parents on this unexpected course of their lives together. Thinking of that book, I imagine it as an old genie’s lamp waiting in that dimly lit health food store. Its magic was of the kind books possess when they come into our lives at the right moment to show us what we need to learn. As my parents opened its worn pages, their future was released.

Not long after they met, Papa told Mama he wanted to get a yogurt maker. Mama suggested a trip to Hatch’s—she was looking for a grain mill to grind flour. In the 1960s, you couldn’t easily buy whole wheat flour or real yogurt—you had to make it yourself—and Hatch’s was one of only a few natural