This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [79]
“Pants dance!” Michèle called out with her French lilt, the urgent code to announce the 10:00 a.m. opening of the stand. At the warning, apprentices scrambled to find their clothes, shed in the heat of the morning sun. Running for the Enchanted Asparagus Forest, they tugged and pulled into T-shirts and shorts, and casually emerged to greet the string of summer folk walking down the grassy lane from the parking lot. Kent always looked cute enough with his muscular gymnast’s chest and cutoff shorts not to scare them away.
“At least they weren’t friends of my parents this time,” Papa said over lunch with a laugh, referring to the last, less successful pants dance incident when Frank tried to hide his nakedness behind the compost heaps to the horror of some visitors from New Jersey.
“You should have just stood there buck naked, pretending you were the normal one,” Kent said, and Frank’s trademark laughter rolled over the patio.
The local gossip lately was about Mama leaving and the apprentices riding nude on a hay wagon through the sleepy—but not sleepy enough—town of Harborside. It was all a bit more excitement than the locals could appreciate. Papa had volunteered to help clear the hayfields around Harborside in exchange for free hay. Lacking a tractor, he and Scott usually cut hay the old-fashioned way, with a scythe, the ancient blade from Europe and Asia popularized in art as the tool the Grim Reaper used to harvest souls. Its long wooden shaft was slightly curved and as tall as a person, with two handles, one at the top and one in the middle. At the bottom was a pointed metal blade the length of a man’s arm. Papa and Scott held the scythes like dance partners, swinging the shaft around their bodies as if it were a lady in a ball gown as they waltzed across the fields, each stroke of the blade cutting a swath of grass that fell under the feet. Once they got into a rhythm, they could make significant progress, stopping every so often to run the sharpening stone across the blade.
On the large Harborside fields, the scythe was no match for a mower pulled behind a tractor, but the owner of the fields needed help loading the hay and carting it to the barn. Papa and the apprentices hitched a wagon to the jeep and everyone rode over in the back, armed with pitchforks. They tossed the hay from the field onto wagons and unloaded it into the barn until, hot and sweaty and itchy, they headed home on top of a full wagon. Michèle, of course, had been chafing at working in her clothes, so she stripped down and let the breeze cool her skin as the wagon weaved through town.
“Well, I’ll be a hot crossed bun, that’s something you don’ see every day,” a local allowed.
“Hippies,” others said, frowning.
Either way, it got people talking, which Papa wasn’t very happy about, worried it would scare customers away from the farm stand. As it turned out, it may have scared some, but those were replaced by others who came in hopes of catching a glimpse of Michèle’s glorious full-body tan.
I, too, loved to ride naked on the hay wagon like Michèle. It was a soft bed, if a bit itchy, smelling so sweetly of clover and timothy, you could almost imagine eating it like the goats. But Papa said I couldn’t go over to the hay fields, I was too little to help, so I had to stay behind with the apprentice tending the farm stand. I sulked all day until they returned, then ran up to climb onto the wagon.
“We’ve got to unload the hay,” Frank said. “Time to come down.”
Everyone else climbed off, picking stems from their hair.
“No,” I said.
Frank laughed his booming laugh, and it was hard to resist