Watermelon Summer by Anna Hess Page A

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