Labor of love bears fruit

On a recent sweltering Friday morning, Angela Mooney is at the Franklin County Farmers Market, selling tomatoes, peppers and tomatillos that she grew on her five-acre sustainable farm.

A female customer fills a bag with German Johnson tomatoes and takes them to another table to weigh.

"I hate that," Mooney says, waiting.

Mooney, 36, would prefer to be the one to weigh the tomatoes. But her scale is on back order and when a person is in a wheelchair, people are always trying to be helpful. She's afraid it makes her seem unprofessional. Being considered less than is the last thing that Mooney wants. She has spent the past 20 years - since a freak accident put her in a wheelchair - defying expectations. She has overcome obstacle upon obstacle. She refuses to give up on herself.

She has extended that same stubborn determination to being a mother to her 4-year-old son, Steven, who has epilepsy and autistic symptoms.

At 18 months, he could neither walk nor talk. When a doctor suggested Mooney and her husband, Joel, feed Steven organic foods, they decided to become farmers. She is convinced that organic food has helped heal him. Now, she's farming for her son and for her life. When the woman returns to Mooney's table with the tomatoes, their conversation turns to Steven.

"How is Steven doing?" the customer asks.

"So far, so good," Mooney replies.

Mooney, her wavy brown hair pulled off her face, her cheeks and arms bronzed from hours in the sun, is funny and smart, well-versed in organic farming and her son's medical condition. She likes to surprise people. If you don't know she is in a wheelchair, she will not tell you on the phone when making plans to meet her but delights in gauging your reaction. She enjoys when a customer raves about just-bought tomatoes then is amazed to find they were grown in a despised hothouse.

A tomboy with dreams

Mooney grew up in the rural outskirts of Atlanta. As a child, she was a tomboy, wearing camouflage, hair braided, climbing trees. She spent many hours tromping through the woods at Panola Mountain State Park, where she became a junior park ranger and wore a patch-covered vest. She dreamed of becoming a real park ranger. She hoped to hike the Appalachian Trail. When she was 12, her family moved to a house on a dirt road outside Youngsville, beyond the suburban outreaches of North Raleigh.

On May 3, 1989, her life changed. Here is what she remembers: Mooney, then 15, was riding her horse along John Mitchell Road not far from her home. A car and a black truck were coming toward her when a couple of dogs scared her horse. The horse jumped. The car swerved out of the way. The truck kept coming. Its extended passenger mirror got tangled in the reins. Mooney was thrown, and her body hit the gas tank.

"I knew my spine was broke," she says. "I couldn't feel my legs."

After a week in the hospital, she was sent to rehabilitation to begin to rebuild her body. That's when a doctor told her: "You will never walk again." The teenager that she was responded: "You can go to hell. I'm going to come back and kick you."

By fall, she was able to attend 10th grade at Bunn High School, but she had changed. She became a "head banger," wearing tight jeans, black boots and Poison and Def Leppard T-shirts. Her wheelchair was decorated with a flaming guitar. She says, "I felt like I had to make them consider me tough because I felt like half a person."

It took a year, but she kept her promise to the doctor, and returned to kick him. Eventually, she was able to walk in braces with forearm crutches. She can still do that but now finds it more convenient to use a wheelchair.

In November of her senior year, she got married, fell sick with bronchitis and missed so many school days that officials refused to pass her. That spring, she became pregnant with her daughter, Nancy. She dropped out of school and later earned a GED. Mooney describes the next eight years of her life and her marriage as difficult. She and her husband were young and weren't good together.

After they separated in 1999, when Mooney was 25, she decided to go back to school. When she mentioned to counselors at vocational rehabilitation that she'd like to study agriculture, they discouraged her because she was in a wheelchair. They suggested art. And so she attended Johnston Community College, graduating with an associate's degree in graphic design and advertising.

A new love, a new life

As Mooney was putting her life back on course, she found love. She and Joel lived on the same road and noticed each other as they passed while driving. Joel asked her out on a date, but she refused until her divorce was final in late 2000. Two days after it was official, they went on their first date. Even though it was 22 degrees outside, they went for frozen yogurt and talked until the clerk had to usher them out at closing time.

Four months later, they married. At their wedding, Mooney, who is part Cherokee, wore Native American regalia, including knee-high moccasins that covered her braces. Joel's brothers walked her down the aisle so she wouldn't have to use crutches. After they exchanged vows, Joel carried her out of church.

"It was like I am finally starting my life," she says.

She and Joel were happy, but they struggled financially. Joel had worked in machine shops, a glass factory and as a dump truck driver. But he says steady work had been hard to find in Franklin County in the last decade.

About five years later, on Jan. 19, 2006, Steven was born. At first, he appeared healthy, but on the way home from the hospital, he had what Mooney now believes was his first seizure. In the car, he screeched, flexed his arms and went limp. When they arrived home, he stopped breathing. They rushed back to the hospital, not knowing whether he would survive the night. Even after he did, the doctors suggested he might never walk, talk or eat on his own.

After 23 days in the hospital, Steven returned home. When he was 3 months old and received his second round of the usual infant vaccinations, Mooney says her son suffered fever, colic and more slight seizures. When it was time for the next set of shots, Mooney searched for a pediatrician close to home who could help her decide how to proceed. She found Dr. Jill Dickerson at Growing Child Pediatrics in Wake Forest.

Dickerson, who now works in Georgia, recalls Steven as an 18-month-old who couldn't talk or crawl. Although he didn't meet the diagnosis for autism, Dickerson says he had autismlike behaviors: head banging, squealing and not talking. Mooney says Steven got stomach viruses, respiratory infections and head colds about every 10 days.

Mooney blames the vaccines for her son's condition, a belief that is controversial. The anti-vaccine movement is led by activists, parents, doctors and researchers who blame childhood vaccinations for a wide range of health issues, including autism. However, the British doctor whose research first claimed a connection between autism and vaccines was stripped of his medical license by British authorities this year, and the medical journal that published his findings has since retracted the article.

However, Dickerson, the pediatrician, says, "I believe he's one of the truly vaccine-injured children out there."

She immediately suggested altering Steven's diet: eliminating dairy products, then gluten and finally going completely organic. (Even that suggestion is controversial; a research study published in May disputes that a change in diet can change an autistic child's behavior.)

Mooney doesn't care whether people believe her. "People can think I'm crazy. I don't care," she says. "I would do anything in the world for my son."

Farming of necessity

When Dickerson made her diet suggestion, the Mooneys were living on what money they had made selling Joel's home and the income he could bring in from odd jobs. Organic food is expensive, and the Earth Fare and Whole Foods grocery stores are at least 30 miles away. They relied on credit cards and financial support from her mother, but the couple knew that wouldn't work for long. So they decided to become farmers.

They started with 125 containers. Now, three years later, she and Joel, with help from Franklin County extension agent Tracy Perry and support from N.C. A&T State University, have designed a farm that she can work in her wheelchair. Tomatoes, tomatillos and watermelon are planted in 24 strip rows wide enough that her wheelchair can pass between them. Asparagus, lettuce and carrots are planted in 13 raised beds built with cinder-blocks to a level that lets her weed and plant from her chair. Peppers, beans and other vegetables grow in 50 containers. More than 400 shiitake logs are lined up in the backyard to grow the exotic mushrooms that she hopes one day will sell for as much as $12 a pound.

While Mooney will boast she can lift a 50-pound bag of soil on her own, her husband does most of the labor-intensive tasks, from laying irrigation to moving the mushroom logs. She knows how to care for the plants, does much of the planting and all of the selling at the market.

About his son and the farm, Joel says, "I guess you can say he eats the fruits of our labors."

Their farm doesn't yet make enough money to support them: a good day at the market nets $58. But there are other rewards. They are happy working together. Her daughter, Nancy, 17, lives nearby and loves her brother Steven. They grow enough to feed Steven and themselves. Their little boy gallops around the garden, eating cucumbers straight off the vine and grazing at the blueberry bush. He knows hundreds of words, speaks dozens and even says sentences like, "Oh, it hurts," and "I love you."

While he still has seizures and wears a diaper, his progress is a victory to his parents and his doctor.

"It was just an amazing turnaround to me," Dickerson says.

Plus, Steven loves being outside. Given a task, he is willing to help by picking up debris, fetching tools and carrying baskets.

That, more than anything else, is what gives Mooney hope. Hope that this small farm will not only feed and help heal Steven but may also provide him with a future in his home, rather than an institution. Hope that her dream of being a farmer will be her life's work, counselors be damned.

"I would love to be successful at this and go back to voc rehab and tell them: I could do this," she says. "If God graces me with success - I'm not real sure of it right now - I want to go back and tell them that."

To an outsider, Mooney's hopes for her son's future may seem optimistic. But she has faced doubters for 20 years, confounding them time after time. And if she has learned anything from her past, it's how to overcome obstacles.

This time, her goal is to make sure the farm lives up to its name: Steven's Legacy.