This life is in your hands One dream, sixty acres, and a family undone

Melissa Coleman

Book - 2011

With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. A luminous, evocative memoir that explores the hope and struggle behind one family's search for a self-sufficient life.

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  • Prologue
  • 1. Family
  • 2. Livelihood
  • 3. Sustenance
  • 4. Seclusion
  • 5. Companions
  • 6. Water
  • 7. Tribe
  • 8. Paradise
  • 9. Bicentennial
  • 10. Loss
  • 11. Atonement
  • 12. Mercy
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • List of Illustrations
Review by New York Times Review

MELISSA COLEMAN'S father, Eliot, once suggested that evidence points to "the return to the land as a cyclical urge in history." Some families work the land out of necessity, while others seek "the good life" through labor and simplicity. In the 1840s, Thoreau took to the woods to "live deliberately." During the Great Depression, selfsufficiency was raised to new importance, and well-educated men like the writer and editor Elliott Merrick and the economist Ralph Borsodi found homesteading a rational and intellectual pursuit. The political climate of the late 1960s (and later the energy crisis of the '70s) provoked back-to-the-land desires in many, including Eliot Coleman, who, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing's book "Living the Good Life," moved in 1968 with his pregnant wife, Sue, to a remote 60-acre wood in coastal Maine. There, they developed sustainable, small-scale farming techniques that would help catalyze the organic movement. A few months after Eliot broke ground for his family's 400-square-foot cedar-and-pine cabin, Melissa was born at home, arriving "on the same day as a large delivery of strawberry plants, asparagus roots and fruit trees that needed to be planted immediately." A day later, the goats began to kid. Baby Melissa was instantly swept into the rhythms of the homesteading life. Coleman's memoir is not one of trendy virtue, but of authenticity. There is no part-time artisanal cheesemaking here, no model trading Louboutins for Bean Boots. Her expressive prose and knowledge of farming techniques give vivid color to her family's alternative lifestyle and unusual milieu. She describes berrystained fingers, rich compost, "wet-pebble shelves full of fresh produce," "the black twist of garter snakes in the grass." But as the memoir reveals, the price of purity was steep. Coleman's book is chiefly driven by two questions. The first regards a quest: Does "the secret of how to live" exist in the memories of her childhood? The second involves the death of her 3-year-old sister, Heidi, who drowned in the family pond: Who, if anyone, was responsible? While questions surrounding Heidi's death are in due course answered, Coleman does not provide a satisfying answer to her original question: how to live. After the heartbreak of her sister's death and parents' divorce, what wisdom does she bring to her own role as a wife and mother? Outside of basic biographical notes, readers will learn little of how she has put the lessons of the farm to practice. She offers only vague conclusions: "If we feed the earth, it will feed us"; "though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return." The author's greatest challenge is to evoke her years at Greenwood Farm from a youthful perspective. When this works, we understand the eccentricities of her childhood: her glee at the sight of the U.P.S. man, the magic of elevator buttons and flushing toilets, the sight of apprentices "harvesting carrots in the nude." Her prose also amplifies the anguish of Heidi's death: "The lines of Papa's face were blurred with tears, the curve of his steel hair gone flat. . . . His body didn't understand such pain, the arch of his back was fetal." But the voice can become tedious when divorced from critical action or revelation (as in passages about Heidi's imaginary playmate). Coleman presents her family's bucolic existence along with a dose of reality that strips the dew off the produce: the homesteading life was grueling and ultimately tore her family apart. There was pressure to sell food and store enough for survival in winter. Money for seeds and supplies was limited. Health insurance was nonexistent. Even as a child, Coleman sensed a "precarious balance" in the relationship of her well-intentioned parents: "To succeed at this life, they had to constantly feed their vision of it, or it would wither and die." She analyzes their actions honestly and generously. Eliot, eager to spread his gardening expertise, possessed "supernatural energy" that was hard to match. But his guru status put him at odds with his wife and the privacy she craved. Sue, exhausted from child rearing and manual labor, crumbled. Coleman remembers "a screaming in my heart" as meals became silent and her parents' marriage dissolved. In her reminiscence, readers will find a world rendered with sublimity, a fusion of beauty and domestic menace. She may fall short in her quest to articulate a prescriptive mode of living, but she fluently describes "the lump in the throat behind everything beautiful in life": the power of the natural world, familial love and heartbreak, grace after loss. Above all, she reminds us that the return to simplicity is often anything but simple. The Colemans' life was bucolic, but also grueling. It ultimately tore them apart. Megan Mayhew Bergman's first story collection, "Birds of a Lesser Paradise," will be published next year.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 8, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review

With parents who were devoted acolytes of original back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, Coleman grew up in the early 1970s as the quintessential hippie baby, eating organic foods, running barefoot and free on 60 acres of Maine's back woods. As her father's enthusiasm for self-sufficiency took on a zealot's verve, Coleman's mother shouldered more of the arduous domestic duties, resolutely tending the family's spartan cabin sans running water or electricity. Known for devotion to the cause, the charismatic young couple soon attracted followers, and when a second child, Heidi, was born, it seemed as though, perhaps, they really could lead a charmed existence. It lasted two years, until the day Heidi drowned in the property's pond. The death of a child has the potential to destroy any family, and Coleman's was no exception. With her parents' divorce, Coleman experienced a surging sense of abandonment, one that she attempts to reconcile in this poignant memoir that chronicles the nascent homesteading counterculture in paralyzing detail.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land lifestyle of Scott and Helen Nearing, Coleman's parents, Sue and Eliot, decided to create their own idyllic reality on 60 acres of land in Maine that was sold to them by the Nearing family for a token sum. While Coleman emphasizes the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued the bounty of nature and freedom of expression, she does not hesitate to also expose farming's detrimental effect on family life-her own well-being as well as the accidental death of her younger sister. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved