This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone by Melissa Coleman

Author:Melissa Coleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sue, Death, Customs & Traditions, Farm life - Maine - Penobscot Bay Region, Drowning - Maine - Penobscot Bay Region, Loss (Psychology), Sociology, Penobscot Bay Region (Me.), Coleman, Social Science, Health & Fitness, Bereavement, Grief, Melissa - Family, Children - Maine - Penobscot Bay Region - Death, State & Local, Drowning, United States, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Penobscot Bay Region (Me.) - Social life and customs, Self-Help, Rural, Maine, History, Melissa - Childhood and youth, General, Case studies, Biography & Autobiography, Safety, Farm life, Eliot, Children, Penobscot Bay Region
ISBN: 9780061958328
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-12T23:41:53+00:00

Go tell Aunt Rhodie

The old gray goose is dead

Drowned in a millpond

Standing on her head

But then I realized Heidi was talking to someone in her bird language. “Go tell Aunt Rhodie” had become “Tel-on-Ferdie.” Mama called her an imaginary playmate, but that wasn’t exactly correct—Telonferdie came and went on her own. She came from a place of wisdom about all things of the world. Sometimes I could see her and sometimes I couldn’t.

As Heidi sang to Telonferdie, the birdsong shattered down on us like rain in the early morning, coming as if from everywhere, from the trees and the woods, even, it seemed, from beneath the earth. At night you heard the frogs instead, rising from the low wet places of the farm—the pond, the drinking water spring—places that turned misty when the air was warmer than the water. The frog voices were like music on the radio, echoey and squarky, calling you to them. If you walked by the pond it was as if someone turned up the volume dial, each crick-crick part of the whole, becoming so loud you couldn’t hear anything else, then fading back into the night as you walked on.

I wished I could hold all these beautiful sounds safe in my belly, to keep them for my own the way Heidi used to put the things she loved into her mouth as a toddler. But when the sun rose, the sounds escaped me and spread out into the world.

“You cannot own these things,” one of the apprentices told me when I tried to catch a bird once, “because they belong to God.”

“What’s God?” I asked.

God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of moon in a dark sky, scatterings of stars, birdsong.

The only person I knew who went to church every Sunday was Skates. She was “an Episcopalian,” she told me, the sound of the word rolling nicely off the tongue. Skates said Heidi and I were heathens. Pagans. Atheists. Unbaptized.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you kids were Episcopalians too?” Skates said. When we visited her over Christmas, she took me to church to pray. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” the voices hissed around me. Our collected souls rose to sing, then sat, then rose again. Skates was tone-deaf, though it didn’t matter to me because so, it seemed, was I. While the singing in the church was beautiful, it could never match for me the sounds of Heidi and the birds in the morning.

“Even though we do not belong to any organized religion, we are very religious people,” Mama had written in her journal a couple years earlier. “We believe in the individual who can be trusted, who is capable of loving, who can carry his own weight and who has a basic goodness.

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