In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment. Anna Edey’s home and greenhouse Solviva grew out of those times, as did Lynne Irons’s little homestead on State Road in Vineyard Haven. Lynne writes the gardening column for the Gazette, and feeds herself year-round from her farming enterprises. The Livingstons raise chickens and have a productive vegetable garden on “Chappalachia,” their home on Chappaquiddick.

Many of us from that era dabbled in homesteading, but Melissa Coleman’s parents took it seriously. Sue and Eliot Coleman forged a life of their own making at Cape Rosier on the coast of northern Maine. Eliot Coleman, organic gardening guru and author, is presently coowner of Four Season Farm at the site where the story takes place. This book is Melissa’s intimate tale of growing up far from the mainstream, with no running water, few neighbors, and the joys and difficulties that resulted from her parents’ choice of a homesteading life. The book also chronicles her parents’ role in the revival of organic farming after big business agriculture, chemical fertilizers and pesticides rose to prominence and extinguished most of the remaining family farms in the post-World War II era.

The Colemans cut the trees on their land, built their home, birthed their babies, and created fertile gardens out of the poor soil on this wooded rocky coast. They hauled seaweed, composted manure, and built up the land to produce vegetables enough to feed themselves year-round, and eventually enough to fill a farm stand that became known throughout the alternative-living community far beyond Maine.

The land they settled was from Helen and Scott Nearing, back-to-the-landers who wrote Living the Good Life, the book that drew nouveau homesteaders to work the earth in remote locations. The Nearings ate vegetarian, grew most of their own food, and incorporated the principles of hard physical work, intellectual pursuits and socializing into the rhythms of each day. They were mentors to the Colemans and other young people disillusioned with life in the mainstream, who made their way to Cape Rosier where they created a small alternative-culture island in the midst of rural Maine. They were outsiders, looked upon suspiciously or skeptically, for their choice of lifestyle, such as gardening in the nude. After Melissa’s birth, when Eliot mentioned to the local shopkeeper that now that he had a daughter born in Maine, it might change their status as locals. The man replied amiably, “If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don’t call ’em biscuits.” They and the Nearings remained too different to fit into the small town culture.

The question “What nurtures us?” is central to the book. Eliot’s burning passion was to share his understanding of the way soil affects plant health, which affects not only eating quality but resistance to bugs. He was nourished by the company of the many apprentices who came to work with them, and by his quest to learn and share ever more about biological practices and what works in gardening. In contrast, Sue wanted to create a self-sustaining nest in which her family could grow. As their farm grew bigger, attracting more people, and taking Eliot more into the public eye, her dream began to unravel and she was pushed beyond her ability to keep on course. Melissa and her sister’s childhood disappointments are woven into the story, but the joy of their carefree lifestyle, and their connection to the natural world, are evident throughout the book.

This Life Is in Your Own Hands is a satisfying blend of themes: the history of the times, the disillusioned youth, the wary elders and the general political upheaval of that era, gardening, how a four-season garden works, and personal revelations. It is the story of a family’s tender beginnings through to its painful dissolution, and “the loss of the dream that happiness could be achieved through purposeful effort alone.” Melissa writes with compassion for her parents and for the little girl that lived through those experiences.

The shadow of her sister’s drowning and her family’s eventual breakup, sketched out in the prologue, hover over her nature-child upbringing and the unfolding of her parents’ self-sustainability ambitions, like the ominous music of Jaws before the shark appears. This revelation early in the book puts the story of their lived-out dream into perspective, and reminds us that paradise found will always be lost.

However, impermanence makes all things possible, and the epilogue leads us back to the present where the “composted” past seems to bring forgiveness and acceptance, and a life that is of one’s own choosing.