This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [91]
The gardens began to fill with naked bodies and new growth alike. A blond woman named Bess, beautiful and reserved, with fair Norwegian skin and eyes, arrived to stay with Bruce in the cabin, and a couple from Connecticut took up residence in the lean-to behind Greg. Two curly-haired guys named Larry and Barry arrived in a pickup, having driven across the country from California to work for the Nearings. Everyone thought they were gay because they slept in the back of the truck together, but they were just friends who’d connected over the Nearings’ books back in San Luis Obispo.
Larry’s interest in organic farming began while he was running a wholesale tree nursery, when he nearly passed out from exposure to Metasystox, a chemical spray that was used to control aphids at the time. He began to experiment with beneficial insects for pest control and got a degree in soil science from Cal Poly. Then, while starting a community garden in San Luis Obispo, he met Barry, who’d read Living the Good Life. Barry wrote the Nearings to ask if he could apprentice, and when Helen replied in the affirmative, Barry asked Larry to drive to Maine with him. Today Larry oversees, with his wife, Sandy, a cooperative of certified organic farms in Baja whose cherry tomatoes can be found at Whole Foods markets around the country.
“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear,” blared Buffalo Springfield from the battery-powered transistor radio in the campground.
“For the times they are a-changin’,” Bob Dylan’s worldly-wise voice followed, as prescient as when he first sang those words more than ten years earlier.
“Hot damn,” Papa said about the farm that year. “Things are taking off.”
After the success of the farm stand the previous summer, Papa’s dream for the farm seemed just within his grasp, but still a mountain with no top, still so much to be done, his thyroid driving him with supernatural energy. He was tired beneath it all, but it was a fatigue that nudged him onward. I sensed that familiar summertime distance in his attentions, as if he were constantly looking toward his goals and unable to focus on me standing in front of him. Or perhaps, like Mama, I needed more from him than he had to give at that time.
Mama’s belly was taking off, too, filling the space of the kitchen as she tried to prepare lunch for the new crew until Anne, with her experience preparing meals at Erewhon, offered to cook lunch, much to Mama’s and Papa’s appreciation. We kids also liked having Anne around. Heidi called her Anner, short for Anner Eater Alligator, and the nickname stuck.
“Anner,” Heidi would say, “sing me a song.” Heidi would listen intently to the tune and then jump up and say, “Gotta go,” and she’d be off to graze in the garden or run down the paths, leading Anner to call her “the little wanderer.” There was something otherworldly about Heidi, one foot in this world and one in the next, Anner thought to herself, wondering as she did about the child forming in own her belly.
“When Heidi walks through the garden, it’s as if she never touches a thing with her feet,” Anner said to Mama.
By the final weeks of first grade I’d become proficient in the skills of school—hula-hoops, jump rope, “onesie-twosies I love yousies,” monkey bars, kickball, wearing underwear, and taking baths. I’d even earned the role of Mrs. Grindle’s teacher’s pet, entrusted with the coveted task of cleaning the chalkboard erasers by clapping them against the tarmac in the playground. But unlike other kids, I still had to walk the half mile down the path to meet the bus every morning.
“Lissie, keep your shoes on!” Mama called out the door after tying the laces double for me with a firm tug, but my shoes were already coming off as I ducked into the cover of the path. Going-to-school rules were getting in the way of barefoot training—I had to catch up to Heidi’s school-free