Watermelon Summer (8 page)

 

    In the afternoons, Lucy and I would take a book and a
snack and wander Greensun's hillsides.  Not far upstream from the
house, I found a grove of towering white pines, the ground beneath which
was mulched nearly bare with pine needles.  I'd been sleeping in
the house ever since I arrived, but I wanted to set aside a bit of
privacy for when the hoards began to pour in (and also because Greensun
seemed to attract unannounced visitors).  So I pitched my tent
under the pines and began to retreat to my new abode every night.

 

    You'd think time alone at Greensun would be boring,
but I had plenty to keep me busy.  The chickens wanted to scratch
up my little garden, so I had to cobble together protection out of
branches and bits of chicken wire I found lying around.  I spent
another day "helping" Arvil with his plot, and later I canned apples
from the tree down the holler.  The Greensun shelves were full of a
diverse array of books that kept me occupied for hours, and I couldn't
resist cleaning up the kitchen, if only to see what other gems—like
an ancient bar of baking chocolate—I'd find pushed behind the flour
and cornmeal.

 

    The highlight of my day, though, was walking up the
hill to check the mailbox.  Nearly every time I made the trek, my
previous note was gone and a new letter from Jacob had shown up in its
place.  A week after I dropped off the banana bread, Jacob's
missive was particularly intriguing since it came with a hand-drawn map
and an invitation to supper at his house.  It turns out that Jacob
lived just on the other side of Cell Phone Hill, and even though I
could
walk the long way around on the roads, if I took this shortcut, my
journey would only be about a mile long.  "Or I could come pick you
up if you'd rather," the note finished.  "Just let me know in your
reply if you'd like to visit.  A meal is the least I can do to
repay you for that delicious banana bread."

 

    I owed Mom a call anyway and was ready for another adventure, so Cell Phone Hill it was.

 

 

 

    I didn't realize until I was cooking myself dinner
that there was another letter addressed to me in the day's
stash.  I'd gotten into the habit of carrying ads and fliers down
the hill and browsing the local color over my meal, which is a good
thing because otherwise I would have missed the envelope that had slid
between the pages of a seed catalog and thus hadn't turned up during my
initial viewing.  There was my name, typed across the front (or a
semblance thereof—"Forsythia Green," just like Arvil had shouted
across the creek).  The return address was...my father.

 

    I was surprised to find I'd thought of him that way,
letting the term "bio-dad" lapse, at least in my mind.  I guess
some combination of Arvil's and Susan's stories had converted Glen from
a deadbeat dad to a wounded dreamer in my mental landscape, and I was
starting to look forward to meeting him once he was out of the hospital
and felt up to making a good (second) impression.

 

    But now I decided my change of tune was unfortunate
since Glen's letter came as a slap in the face.  It was a typed page,
the majority of which read like a legal document, and I soon realized
the letter was a mass mailing send out to everyone who planned to attend
the upcoming meeting.  It wasn't even addressed to me, at all,
beginning with the vague words: "Dear friends old and new."

 

    And it wasn't just the tone that made my breath catch
in my throat.  It was the contents.  Glen's letter marked the
end of the pipe dream I'd been spinning in my head during every hour I
puttered in the garden or peered down at the community house from the
hillside above.  I'd started to think that, maybe, I could
rekindle the spark of community that my father had first inspired, but
now I saw I'd merely been daydreaming.  Because Glen was going to
let Greensun go.

 

 

 

    My bio-dad started the letter with his own version of the
story Arvil had already told me.  He wrote at length about taking
in "strays" (by which, I gathered, he meant people, not the peacocks
that now roosted in the rafters of the barn), and he continued by remembering that so
many of the long-term residents were broken in some
way.  "Most of the
responsible, stable people—probably many or all of you planning
to attend the upcoming meeting—abandoned the farm in disgust at each
other or,
often, at me," he asserted.

 

    "Years ago, when we were all rubbing elbows in one
back-biting mass, I remember hearing a Greensun inhabitant refer to
me as 'the lord of the manor,'" my bio-dad's letter continued.  "Whoever said that was
right.  How can an equal community be founded on unequal
footing, when one person owns the land and has the right to tell
others to leave?  Although that was far from the only problem
with my vision, it definitely didn't help."

 

    In my bio-dad's eyes, another part of the problem was
the way he and his friends never integrated into the wider
community.  "I'm well aware that our neighbors referred
to our noble experiment as 'Hippie Holler' and warned their children
away from us," he reported.  I had to admit that this part, at
least, was 100% correct, at least from my limited experience. 
"What's
the point of a community that's so counter-cultural you turn off the
people who live right next door?" Glen asked.

 

    So, okay, it didn't work then, but why throw out the
baby with the bathwater?  Unfortunately, it seemed that in Glen's
eyes, Greensun wasn't worth saving if the results weren't perfect. 
He finished his letter by explaining that he planned to sell the
property in the next year "hopefully to someone who can re-envision
this valley to become the ecological farm I once dreamed of." 
That would only happen if we could jump through his hoops, though.

 

    The lucky buyer would need $30,000 (the original
price of the land, with no adjustment for inflation), but that was the
easy part.  We would also have to create Glen's utopian vision of
what Greensun should have been.  That meant there'd be at least two
people living on the farm full time, and four-plus people as members of
the community.  We'd be making a solid living ("at least $10,000
per member per year") from a farm-related business, and would figure out
all the forms to file to make the community official on paper. 
Scariest of all, from my point of view at least, we needed to get the
owner of each adjoining property on board so they knew what our
community was and approved of our mission.

 

    And if we couldn't?  Then Glen would put
Greensun up for sale, never mind its long history and the joy I'd seen
in Susan's, Arvil's, and my mother's faces when they talked about the farm's
past.  Because anything we couldn't do right wasn't worth doing at
all.

 

 

 

    I didn't sleep well that night, even though my tent
usually cocoons me in such safety I instantly fall into deep
slumber.  By morning, I hadn't decided whether to bail on my visit
to Jacob and just wallow in self pity, but I
was
sure that I wanted to trek to the top of Cell Phone Hill and call my
mother.  There are times when no one else's input will do, and all
you want is to run home to Mommy—this was one of those times.

 

    "What's wrong?" Mom answered on the second
ring.  I'd pushed ahead to the top of the ridge without stopping,
and my breathless hello was enough to set off Mom's radar.  Even
though I was simply low on oxygen rather than close to tears, she was
right—something was wrong.  How to explain the issue to my
over-protective mother was another matter entirely.

 

    I started out by just filling her in on the bare
bones of my time in Kentucky, picking up where my letter had left
off.  Mom was thrilled to hear I'd met Kat, was surprised to
discover I had three other half-siblings bopping around the east coast,
and was glad that Arvil and I had hit it off so well.  When I
finally told her about Glen's letter, though, she got the tone of voice
I'd come to recognize—my mother was trying hard not to say anything
bad about my bio-dad and was left with few other words.

 

    "Why don't you talk to Johnny for a minute?" 
This was a clear cop-out on Mom's part, but I hadn't spoken with my
little brother since leaving home and was glad to listen to him chatter
about his summer adventures.  I was a little surprised, though,
when the phone got passed to Dad next rather than rotating back to Mom.

 

    "Aren't you supposed to be at work?" I asked, confused.

 

    "That glad to talk to me?" joked my stepfather,
and I smiled despite myself—I'd missed Dad's even keel. 
After explaining that his company was letting him work from home a
couple of days a week, he got to the point.  "So I hear Glen's selling
the property out from under you.  How does that make you feel?"

 

    Didn't that strike right to the heart of the
matter?  I wasn't really sure how I felt—angry perhaps, maybe
disappointed, or was my  primary emotion betrayal?  Here I had
flown all the way across the country to meet my biological father and Greensun,
and it felt like the former was telling me to go back home.

 

    "Well, do you want to come home?" Dad asked. 
"That's always easy—we can put you on a plane tomorrow.  But
would you regret not staying for the meeting?"

 

    Dad was right.  I'd definitely regret it if I
fled, and as I talked through the issue aloud, I realized there was no reason to.  Glen's letter said he'd be
keeping the property as-is for a year, in hopes someone in Greensun's
circle decided to resurrect the community.  "And they probably
will," I told Dad, feeling relieved even as I spoke the words.  "I
could tell Susan had some really good times here, and I'm sure the other
people did too.  It'll be interesting to see what strategy they
decide to take to save this place."

 

    Already, I could feel my enthusiasm returning. 
Wouldn't it be amazing to be involved in bringing Greensun back to
life?  Maybe Glen's ultimatum was a blessing in disguise—this
would give me a chance to see what the intentional community could be
like in its prime rather than just spending my summer living in a
cemetery of old dreams.  My mind started to whirl, but in a more
pleasant way, as I pondered how I could help make the Save Greensun
campaign a reality.

 

    Dad sounded a bit noncommittal as I enthused over the
possibilities, but that was okay.  I knew he'd been less than
thrilled at the idea of me spending the summer in rural Kentucky, too,
but he had my back.  My whole family did.  Maybe even my
bio-dad was helping me in his own unique way.  I decided to give Glen the benefit of the doubt and see
where his mandatory adventure took me.