An exclusive excerpt from Martha McPhee's new memoir, Omega Farm
Omega Farm sits on top of a hill, the highest point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, with sweeping views over fields and farms, the Sourland Mountains unfurling in the distance to meet a big and open sky. When you sit on the deck the sun rises on your right, just beyond a barn and another field and chicken run, a rooster crowing. The sun sets in spectacular fashion across the valley. The midday heat, which comes on hard and thick in July, is cut in half by a canopy of enormous oaks and ash.
At the far end of the new wing, Dan added an indoor swimming pool that he kept heated to 105 degrees with a furnace all its own. Sliding Japanese doors with their smoked panes sealed in a steam so thick you couldn’t see your hand. Dan practiced as a Gestalt therapist, though he wasn’t legally licensed, and often, naked, he’d see his patients, also naked, in the pool.
If you believed this Texas storyteller, who drove into our lives in a turquoise Cadillac belonging to his father-in-law, the whole place was history. According to Dan, the house sat on the site of a sacred Lenape burial ground. He told us that if we looked hard enough, we could find Lenape coins and arrowheads. He told us that George Washington had camped at the foot of our driveway near the Alexauken Creek on his way to defeat the British troops at what is now known as Washington Crossing.
At the suggestion of a friend, she started seeing Dan, who ran his Gestalt therapy practice in Princeton. He lived there, too, with Sally and their children, and he had a reputation in town as a feminist, a supporter of women, even organized sit-ins in pubs that excluded women. Although he was unlicensed, he advertised the therapy practice and worked with groups on realizing sexual equality. His thesis was essentially sound: The dehumanizing role we ascribe to women was good for neither sex.
Back home at Omega Farm, the dinner table was always crowded and often argumentative, the tectonic pressures, resentments, shifting allegiances, and betrayals of two very different families suddenly erupting, say, over the issue of abortion.was in the news. As a Catholic, Dan was stridently against abortion, even though swirling among the children, whispers passed from ear to ear, was the secret that my mother had been pregnant twice before giving birth to Joan.
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