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Self-sufficient memoir
By Megan Mayhew Bergman |
May 8, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
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 well-educated men such as 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 1970s) provoked back-to-the-land desires in many, including Eliot Coleman, who 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 give vivid color to her family's alternative lifestyle and unusual milieu. She describes berry-stained fingers, rich compost and "wet-pebble shelves full of fresh produce."
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 three-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.
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.
In the 1840s, Thoreau took to the woods to "live deliberately." During the Great Depression well-educated men such as 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 1970s) provoked back-to-the-land desires in many, including Eliot Coleman, who 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 give vivid color to her family's alternative lifestyle and unusual milieu. She describes berry-stained fingers, rich compost and "wet-pebble shelves full of fresh produce."
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 three-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.
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.
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