This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [81]
As happy as Mama was to be home, summer was still summer, her quiet homestead overrun, the farm teeming with youthful naked bodies. Everywhere you looked, apprentices and visitors were climbing out of tents or rolling up sleeping bags from the ground. You had to be careful where you squatted in the woods to pee, as someone else might be squatting nearby—and there’s nothing worse than having your bum unwittingly exposed in that vulnerable position. They bathed under buckets from the well, cooked in the kitchen, and ate lunch on our patio, coming and going from the house as they had in Mama’s absence. They were like kids, too, each competing with the gardens for attention, their energies pushing Mama into a smaller and smaller space for herself.
Heidi and I fought more often—pinching, screaming, pulling hair. Mama covered her ears and ran from us, the sounds of our crying at odds with her capacity for calm. She felt, more than ever, other people’s emotions as if inside herself. It doubled the confusion in her mind. She needed quiet to sift through the feelings and throw out the ones that weren’t hers. So she did what she always did in times of overload: she checked out.
“I just need some space,” she said to Heidi and me.
But there was no space. What we needed were boundaries, but we had done away with boundaries. Boundaries were uncool. And so we felt the loss of each other more deeply because we were all part of each other.
“I was not born to be forced.” Mama copied these words from Thoreau into her journal, which had evolved from a daily log to a place for quotes from others, reminders to herself that she was not alone in her feelings, and in these musings she hoped to find the strength she sought. “I will breathe after my own fashion. . . . If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”
When Mama retreated into the addition’s bedroom to rest, Heidi and I ran from the house, screen door slamming, to find engagement in the life of the farm and intrigues of summer.
“Let’s go to the campground.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Once our minds were set on going somewhere, we never walked, we always ran. Running was as free and light as flying, and the more you ran, the longer it took for the heavy feeling to catch you. Heidi padded behind me with fast little steps as I ran down the sawdust paths of the garden, along the lawn in front of the farm stand, up the grassy lane, across the packed gravel of the parking lot, and into the campground that sloped down from the driveway in the woods between our homestead and Keith and Jean’s.
At the top of the slope sat the log cabin and cook shack, below which platforms were scattered across the fern-covered ground like floors without houses, topped with the canvas peaks of tents. A laundry line hung between two trees, flapping with drying towels and clothes that never came entirely clean. At the far side sat a granite boulder, the size of a VW Bug almost, smoothed and dropped by an ancient glacier. Hanging from a tree was a rope that you pulled back to the rock; you then hopped onto the knot and swung over the clearing, nearly into the trees.
Apprentices harvested what they needed from the garden to make their meals and got goat’s milk from Mama, digging little holes next to their tents to keep the perishables cool. “My goat’s milk keeps going sour and turning pink,” Kent complained over breakfast. “That’s one way to ruin granola!”
“Morning, Franklin,” everyone chimed from the cook shack when they heard the sound of Frank blowing his nose from his hayfever, loud as a foghorn and regular as an alarm clock. Eventually Frank had enough teasing and moved his tent to the back field, where he could make his noises in peace. Trips to town were rare, but when the laundry situation got desperate, everyone piled into the