This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone
Melissa Coleman
Language: English
Pages: 341
ISBN: B004HD61J0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is in Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history.” —Tom Perrotta
In a work of power and beauty reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Jeannette Walls, and Dave Eggers, Melissa Coleman delivers a luminous, evocative childhood memoir exploring the hope and struggle behind her family's search for a sustainable lifestyle. With echoes of The Liars’ Club and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Coleman’s searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970’s, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.
1940s, Wickenden set out to skeptically analyze the claims of the fledgling organiculture—or natural farming—movement, but found that not only did chemical fertilizers deplete the soil, but vegetables tasted better when grown on healthy soil amended with organic matter and natural nutrients. “Did you know there are billions of organisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil?” Papa asked Mama, his nose deep in the Wickenden book, the concept of a self-sufficient natural system opening the door to a new
his bad diet and too much drink, was Papa’s first thought. Mama found him in the hunting lodge, tears in his eyes for the first time since they’d met, but unable to express the depth of his sadness. His father had left too easily, a gentleman to the end. As he washed the dirt from his hands, Papa swore to himself he’d live a fuller life to make up for his father’s short one. That meant staying healthy so an early death wouldn’t strike him and his own family. Looking down at his hands, he realized
once collected and preserved at birth and sold to sailors, who believed it would protect them from drowning at sea. Upon weighing in at six pounds thirteen ounces, the baby was immediately placed on Mama’s breast to nurse, as Mama had requested, and the small mouth began to suckle instinctively. While at the hospital, Mama tried to imagine she was at home. She had asked that Dr. Brownlow give her no medication or episiotomy, no silver nitrate after the birth. Instead she drank one quart of
right. “Heidi was just there behind that bush, scurrying away,” she told Anner. “I feel her everywhere. In the leaves and the grass and the breeze. She’s all around us.” Sandy felt Heidi’s spirit, too. When she rose in the darkness to fetch water at the well for baking bread, Heidi’s energy seemed to pulse in the darkness. As she dipped the bucket into the water with the well pulley, the spirit shape ballooned bigger and bigger around her until she couldn’t breathe. Fearing the intensity of
was his friend now, and that I could play with them only if I pretended to be a boy. It was much preferable to play with John at his house than stay at home, so I decided to be a boy so I could watch TV and eat junk food. Given the choice of my two gender role models at that time, Mama and Papa, being a boy seemed the better choice. Mama couldn’t win. Nothing worked out for her. She was always saying how hard it was to be a mother. Nursing all the time, cooking and cleaning.