This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [90]
Soon the chartreuse buds would unfurl in the breeze like miniature flags as the sun relaxed across the farm, igniting the edges of new leaves. A kaleidoscope of young people would again fill the campground to work for us or help the Nearings finish their stone house, and the pregnant bellies swelling on many of the women—Mama, Jean, and Bobbie—would turn into babies. Soon July of 1976 would mark America’s bicentennial, two hundred years of democracy, and shortly after, Viking 1 would capture images of what looked like a face on the surface of Mars, sparking countless imaginations.
“The universe is ever expanding,” said some. “Democracy begins to fail after two hundred years,” said others.
“Rain coming,” Heidi said from next to me on the swing.
“How do you know?” I asked.
She turned to me, hair falling across her forehead so it didn’t seem as oblong as it used to. The skin of her hands was still soft as a baby’s, but she was becoming a little girl, an impish sparkle in her pale blue eyes.
“Listen,” she said. I felt the shift inside as my mind drifted into the flickering of light upon the leaves. All knowledge was in that moment; the trees were merely gossiping about it.
“See,” Heidi said, nodding at me. “Rain.”
The rain began the next day and continued for weeks. Leaks ate their way through roofs, moss grew on the vacant tent platforms, and our clothes never came dry. The mist collected in fine drops on the skeins of cobwebs, and the pond grew deep and dark as night. We began to forget what the combination of blue sky and sun looked like, growing morose and dull as mushrooms despite ourselves, our faces puffy and pale, eyes wary. A beam of sun falling through a brief patch of clear sky was godlike in its rare beauty, similar to finding the exotic lady’s slipper flower in the forest, but the moments of brightness hurt the unaccustomed eye, making us squinty and sullenly ungrateful, as if seeing an old friend we were sure had forsaken us.
Anne arrived before the white-throated sparrow on a wet day in early April. Her tan Ford Fairlane, with a trunk big enough to sleep in, crunched over a crust of snow clinging stubbornly to the north side of the driveway, despite the rain. She was pregnant, due in winter. We did what we did with everyone: we took her in. Mama, due in May, immediately felt the connection pregnant women sometimes feel with each other. Anne had a short bounty of curly chestnut hair and equally brown and large eyes. She radiated the spiritual purity of a nun, coupled with a beautiful singing voice and skill at the guitar, leading someone to call her a brunette Maria from The Sound of Music.
Coming from a Catholic family of seven kids in western New York, Anne had sought her own path by majoring in French and spending a year in France before taking a job at the whole food supplier Erewhon in Boston, cooking for employees. She later decided to apprentice at Wildwind Farm—where Frank had also apprenticed—and there she found herself pregnant. Things didn’t work out with the father, so, seeking a new home, she heard about us, and decided to visit in hopes of finding refuge.
“I was not a person with my feet solidly on the ground,” she realized about herself. “My head was in the ether.”
Anne found the cabin occupied by another new apprentice named Bruce. Despite his offer for her to move in, she insisted on putting up her tent on a mossy platform below. Papa started her on spring seeding, along with Michèle, the French Canadian nymph of the previous summer, who was living with Greg in his cabin, Greg having temporarily won out in the competition with Frank for Michèle’s heart. It would be Frank, however, with whom Michèle would eventually settle and raise a family. Particularly taken by Anne’s serene purity was Brett, who’d built the log cabin in the campground a couple years earlier and was now the chief carpenter for the woodwork in the Nearings’ stone house. Papa had recently