Our favorite bookstore at the local mall announced its going out of business sale so the wife and I paid our last respects and took full advantage of the bulk clearance extravaganza. We stacked piles of titles at dirt cheap prices assuring there will be plenty of pages to pour over this coming winter. For such a meager wager, the jackpot was quite significant.
This Life Is In Your Hand is a memoir of a child growing up on the coast of Maine off-the-grid and against-the-grain in an early 1970s back-to-the-land community. It takes a few pages to get the ball rolling but once it does you should make sure you're properly strapped in on this emotional rollercoaster.
The subplots are intertwined with the teachings of radicals Scott and Helen Nearing's bible for self-reliance Living The Good Life and the self-imposed lifestyle of their disciples, Eliot and Sue Coleman during the twilight of hippie ethos and communal experimentation and the severing of the imbilical cord that connected them to modern amenity economics. This is all seen through the eyes of the child Melissa Coleman. Like any great book she is able to evoke all of the senses; nature's scent, the ground traversed by bare feet, the sound of morning, the weight of the world. Wrapped up with the uneasy feeling of a childhood of insecurities inflicted by a society looking down its collective nose at the heathen, feral, and unwashed who possessed an ancient knowledge that was sought after and sacred.
It all infolded beneath an US Department of Agriculture that was preaching "Get big, or get out." This was the last vestige of what commercial farming couldn't eradicate. When they were stamping out the family farm they missed this one.
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