Rob’s outside swearing at his motorcycle, throwing wrenches like thunderbolts, while I’m trapped inside, forced to leave the window open for his extension cord.
The bugs? Oh, they’re loving it. It’s a 70’s disco party in my bedroom. They’ve got lights, they’ve got a dance floor, and I’m just trying to survive.
Then it happens— this beast of a creature comes flying at my face.
I swear, it’s like a kissing bug and a cockroach had a baby, with extra-long antennas, navigating with sonar and radio frequencies to nail me better the second time.
It flies to the wall— and I dare to get a better look.
Mistake. Because now the sonar’s pinging, and it’s coming back for round two. This thing’s on a home run mission.
I ninja-arm that sucker into the drywall, grab the nearest weapon—a bottle of chewable vitamins— and slam it down like I’m banishing it to the underworld.
I’m currently praying he’s dead.
There’s no rest in peace for bugs in my house. It’s more like a tombstone, and it reads:
“Here lies the devil’s mount, smashed by a 30 count. A bet was lost, so he went home, his ride was left to die alone.”
That’s right. In this house, bugs don’t just die— they get sentenced. In the South, we believe in Jesus— and if you’re uninvited, you’re fixin’ to meet Him.
Watching sunbeams skip across dew drops on the windshield while our rickety car dipped over uneven roadways was beautiful, but as familiar as Grandma’s kitchen. Midnight drives across the United States and waking up to crevices, deserts, and gullies unseen were part of my childhood. Rolled in between blankets pulled off my bed, with snacks and stacks of clothing toppling into my lap, for a girl who belonged to a family of travelers, it was a walk through customs.
I would rub the blurred vision away, attempting to make sense of where I had landed, piecing together the taste in the air for clues and small details. Sometimes it was my mom behind the wheel; other times it was my grandfather, and I’d say, “Papa? Where are we now?” My sense of direction was nowhere close to understanding whether the dashboard was pointed north toward Maine or south toward the coasts of Florida this time.
Always a grin across their lips and a comment resembling, “Oh good! You’re up! Guess where we’re going?” They were identical, my mother and her father—heads tossed back in laughter at my twisted confusion. I was never in on the joke they’d hatched only hours before. A bug creeping across the mattress, a bite waking them to gather maps without much planning, and suddenly we were on a road trip to some unknown place with an unsuspecting surprise.
A good portion of this is why I have been to almost all fifty states (minus two), lived in other countries, and wandered across much of Europe before I reached my thirties. For so long, I wanted to sit still without being pulled away repeatedly. Not a gift I received until adulthood. Yet it was all so exciting, and even now—facing the North Georgia sunshine, I know leaving home makes the taste of magnolia and iced tea swirl across my tongue even sweeter.
Not knowing where I’d land was enchanting. My childhood of spelunking, wading through waves of rippling tide grass, and watching bison tear across the earth hard enough to leave me gasping has carried forward into holding my son’s hand, taking him to places some children never get to experience.
At ten years old, he’s already seen more states than most adults manage in their lifetime. Sometimes the miraculous discoveries land right in our backyard. When I first laid eyes on the advertisement, I knew Nikolai had to see it. At two hundred and twenty-five miles, it was deemed one of the best long-distance balloon races in America.
While browsing the news, an article about Helen, Georgia’s race to the Atlantic held me captive. On a Wednesday night in May, I booked a hotel, packed our vehicle, and buckled my son into the booster seat. His face was the mirror of a younger me. I slid behind the wheel and grinned at the beautiful confusion etched across his features—stormy blue eyes asking all the questions his lips hadn’t readied themselves to speak.
“Guess where we’re going?” I teased, my voice tangled with laughter.
He didn’t have any guesses. I reached a hand toward the back seat, squeezing his fingers. Just my boy and me, setting off on wild balloon adventures. Snacks spilling into his lap, luggage stacked for a two-day trip—the boy never saw it coming.
That night, when I tucked him into a queen-sized bed with a different view of the mountains we had come to love, I kissed his forehead with a promise: spectacular things come in the morning. No glowing television, only shadows on the walls. Excitement so sharp we barely slept.
Our wake-up alarm sounded, but neither of us moved. Still, before the sun, we managed to greet the day, slipping on our shoes in the dim hush. Nikolai’s legs danced their way to the breakfast buffet, the boy nearly eating asphalt in his hurry to reach the car. Switchback roads curled ahead, fog blushing pink and gold as it cascaded into the valley below. I passed the time by asking what he might take on a long adventure.
“Water, snacks! I would need snacks. My binoculars Daddy bought me, and a picture of Daddy since he’s working. Mommy, I would have to take you.”
His words reached into my chest and clasped my heart. My camera, nestled in the passenger seat, slid against the upholstery, nearly tumbling to the floorboard. I caught it, the weight steady in my hand, and my creative mind bloomed with an image of my son—inside a hot air balloon, racing toward the Atlantic. He couldn’t fly with them, but I have a knack for breathing life into his ambitions. I dog-eared the thought and prepared to catch the ember.
Crowds of visitors followed a nature path into the woods where birds fluttered their morning greetings, until the turf gave way to tipped balloons and fire-breathing contraptions nestled in a woodland hollow. Awe and delight lit my son’s face in colors beyond anything he had seen before. Picnic blankets lined the hill for a front-row view, children clutching hands, bug-bitten limbs marked by the soil in the name of anticipation for liftoff. Families sat cross-legged, speaking reverently over hot cups of coffee and pre-made food—every nationality, every shade of skin—gathering for a tradition passed down simply for the joy of being a witness.
When the first balloon lifted, the crowd erupted in clapping, laughter, and well-wishes that echoed against bark and branches. My hands trembled, damp against the camera, as faces peered down from above. Their beautiful vantage became my living nightmare, making me feel effortlessly small. Yet the substance of dreams is believing impossible things. Success comes not only from attempting something massive, but from daring it, even with the risk of falling. Everything I wanted my son to remember was here, drawn out of the wonder of exploring the world.
I learned as much from this perspective as I hoped to teach him. Seeing through my son’s eyes revealed my mother’s and grandfather’s parenting in a new light. Teaching my boy teaches me in return. At four years old, his memory will be hazy, but mine holds it clear. Exploring wasn’t only about me as a child—it was tasting the old, dressed in new seasonings.
Contentment settled as I folded the blanket over my arm after the last balloon drifted toward a cloud shaped uncannily like a T-Rex. The balloons hung suspended in the air as we walked back to the car. Cobblestone streets, a bobbing river, and a hot cup of tea warmed both our hands. Nikolai stooped to collect stones for his pockets—some of which still turn up in random places around our farm today.
When we pulled into the driveway at home, he bolted to his room and dug through the toy box for his flight jacket, goggles, and pilot’s hat. Crayon maps spread across the floor. The dog was conscripted into service as co-pilot, and together they flew past the chickens, who clucked their disapproval.
By day’s end, long lashes rested on peach skin, bowed lips parted slightly, a pilot’s hat tugged low across his face, and an arm draped over the dog’s belly. This autumn, we’re going to Ireland, where history leaves castles scattered across the countryside. My boy will remember every taste, detail, and scent, carving his name from the United States into the world beyond it. I can’t imagine what he will teach me next.
In the early hours before dawn, I stumbled to the sofa in my pink bathrobe—my eyes squinting under fluorescent lights as I yawned and stretched in my pajamas and green fuzzy socks. I listened for the microwave to ping, signaling that my water had boiled—just in time to drop in a fresh bag of tea to wake up my brain.
I snatched my phone to scroll the news—a habit of selecting uplifting articles I might enjoy.
That’s when I came across a botanical mystery I’d never heard of—unusual and completely enchanting.
I gasped—just as Nikolai walked in with his backpack slung over one shoulder and a missing shoe on the loose. His forever-curious mind couldn’t help but plop down beside me, a hand strangling a dangling sock, to see what I was staring at. There on my screen was a picture of a rare thing more lovely than many of the flowers we had grown over the years.
While planning this year’s growing season, I couldn’t help imagining what next year might hold. After three years of waiting, the Everglass House would be finished. I’d finally be able to garden through the winter.
Being a lover of the unusual, I pictured a garden gate tangled with poisonous blooms—demanding respect and distance from the garden while increasing my knowledge of the strange. A farm full of furry faces and a boy to protect put that idea on a shelf.
So instead, I dreamed up a moon garden—just for me. With flowers that only opened at night when the frustrations of insomnia would strike. As a night owl at heart anyway, I enjoy the sounds of the widows and whippoorwills. It’s often hard to sleep in new places (like vacation hotel rooms) that don’t have an opera of tree frogs or the throaty rhythm and twang of Southern leopard frogs adding to the ambiance. When I’m not home, I’m thinking up ways to bottle them up.
The music of the night and the magic of unusual flora embracing the glow of moonlight kissing petals, in my mind, was a recipe of things imagined coming to life—because why not?
What’s more romantic than tiptoeing through starlit grass, hoping you don’t step on a copperhead, just to admire blooms no one else would even notice—much less adore?
So when that strange apparition appeared on my screen, desire bloomed right alongside it—wild, irrational, and entirely out of reach.
As Nikolai and I went down the rabbit hole of facts, it quickly became clear—finding one without falling for a scam was like digging for gold in a silver mine.
I tucked my disappointment into my pocket, saved the screenshot like a secret, and walked out into the drizzle with Nikolai, dodging mud puddles in the thick morning air. We dashed through a downpour over to Natasha’s house to wait for the bus. Niki—the walking encyclopedia—started spilling facts about the phantom we encountered from the moment we shook the water clinging to our clothing.
“They have to see it, Mom!” I smiled at his need to share—and sure enough, their eyes were wide with disbelief, just as mine had been.
“You need that plant, LaShelle,” said my habit-enabling bestie—the same woman who loads up her car with mystery greens and tells my husband she has no idea how those plants ended up at my house. Thank goodness for her and my other bestie, who basically deals in perennials like it’s contraband and I’m the willing addict. I’d be nowhere close to the garden of my dreams without them.
“I mean… it’s a cactus. I don’t do cacti. Or succulents (moss rose excluded). They’re like the introverts of the plant world, and I’m not a fan of the desert.”
Natasha narrowed her eyes. “LaShelle. It. Has. All the things you love. You literally collect them like trophies. Don’t even pretend.”
“Yeah, I know… but it’s not like I can make a centerpiece out of it.” I gave a helpless shrug. She rolled her eyes, and we moved on. I mentally tucked the specter away where it belonged.
A few months later found us in Arizona, juggling a family visit while Rob was off on his annual motorcycle trip. Nikolai and I were fitting it all in—sun, relatives, and a whirlwind schedule while shaking off jet lag—when I stumbled into the vibrant chaos of a desert farmers market, wild vivid color, dust, and distraction.
A birthday extravaganza for my mom, my brother, his fiancée, and my wonderful husband—all in the same month—left me snagging homemade non-GMO bagels for everyone and balancing motherhood.
I bobbed and weaved past vendors peddling chaos, handing out the universal phrase for “no thanks”: “Maybe later!” I zeroed in on the coffee and tea stand like it was a safe house—matcha never questions my choices, and lavender never asks about family reunions.
Rob was most likely still tearing down some canyon road like a cowboy in a helmet. He was supposed to meet up, but I was sure he wouldn’t make it.
I wasn’t there for the trinkets—but I had every intention of adopting a few. Not because I needed them, but because retail therapy speaks fluent serotonin. And unlike actual therapy, it doesn’t ask hard questions or bring up my childhood.
Then I saw it—a quaint little plant stand filled with things I hadn’t seen before. And one stopped me in my tracks.
A bizarre cactus—the very kind I said I didn’t want—with a white flower blooming at the top. As far as trinkets go, the living ones trump the rest.
“Umm, excuse me, sir? How much is this?” I attempted to ask the guy behind the counter.
A tall brunette was doing her best to melt the pavement—long legs, dramatic flat-ironed hair tosses, chic sunglasses perched across her nose. The kind of laugh that comes rehearsed—while the plant seller’s wife looked like she was counting to ten in three languages.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I rolled my eyes so hard someone probably heard them hit the back of my skull. Still, I wasn’t giving up—because like a kid holding their pee too long, I had to go… to the car with the thing I told my best friend I didn’t want.
The plant seller’s wife stepped in to tell me she had no idea what it was, but she mentioned the cost. I told her I’d think about it—not because it was unreasonable, but because I was tired of waiting for answers to questions I wasn’t going to get. As I turned to leave—bam—that vision hit me. The one I saw on that rainy morning before Nikolai left for school…
“Do you happen to have this bizarre plant I’m looking for? You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but if I leave without asking and find out you did… I’ll never forgive myself.”
She looked caught off guard, and I figured I was correct. She had no clue.
Clutching my wallet, juggling bags, and hanging onto matcha for dear life, I turned again to walk away—until the keeper of the plant tables finally spoke to stop me.
“What did you ask for?” His eyes lit up, voice suddenly curious—as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard. “That’s my favorite plant of all time. It constantly gets overlooked because people have no idea what it can become.”
I could relate.
“I actually do have one. I rarely bring them to market because nobody buys them, but… I brought one with me today. Just in case.”
I nearly gasped. Swooned. Needed a defibrillator. I called Rob right away—he had miraculously pulled over and answered. I didn’t cry, but I may have proposed all over again right there in the middle of a dusty parking lot with cactus fever in my voice. “If you love me,” I said, “you’ll buy me this weird and wonderful plant, and I’ll never ask for anything else ever again—until next week.”
Meanwhile, my brother and his fiancée were staring at me like I’d lost my mind. His sweet fiancée nodded enthusiastically—probably trying to understand my sanity.
Hands trembling, I whipped out my debit card, swiped—and in the blink of a flirty brunette, the floral drug deal was done. No need to call the DEA—I was high on chlorophyll.
We finished shopping while I rode a cloud—floating over oceans of giddy elation.
I wrapped my arms around her to skate through the market aisles, surrounded by floods of colorful items I no longer gave a crap about. The bite of spicy peppers and fresh-cut onions lingering from street-side taco trucks wafted behind as I neared the car. I shielded her sacred limbs with my umbrella fingers—terrified someone might bump me and snap her limb. Those nubs were the precious jewels in the Queen’s crown.
And then my mother spotted me and laughed. “That’s what you bought? Fifty dollars?”
I refused to let her rain on my excitement. “Absolutely,” I said proudly. “And she’ll need her own seat in the car.”
I nodded like I was punctuating a sentence. Thankfully, Niki was once again spewing facts about this incredible marvel people underestimate and look at with concern. I tucked her into a throne of my possessions, and we set off from one destination to the next—until we finally made our way to meet my wonderful husband.
I was beaming endlessly, like the sun does in the Mojave Desert—still trying to call Rob to prepare him for her arrival. Our car pulled into the parking lot of a run-down fast food joint—its neon sign half-lit, half-dead, and falling off-kilter. Rob’s motorcycle looked well-weathered, with a rogue tumbleweed clinging beneath the wheel well. Parked side-by-side with the bike his best friend John rides, battered with raindrops.
I held my breath, squared my shoulders, and walked with purpose.
Smiling as I entered and slid into a broken plastic orange seat next to my husband, I bit my cheek nervously as I began to explain myself.
“Hey babe! I missed you! Listen… about that plant you let me buy—yep, the fifty-dollar one. Um… I need to warn you before you actually meet her, okay? A little pre-introduction, if you will.”
His eyes were already suspicious. His hair a mess from the helmet and exhaustion clearly etched.
“What did you do?”
“I bought it like you said I could! Rob approved, I even asked first, so you can’t be mad at me,” I said with a tilt in my voice.
Now he’s really concerned.
“I don’t think I want to see it,” he said.
I could tell he was nervous—and I laughed hesitantly. That plant was traveling first-class—from the Arizona desert to the humid jungles of North Georgia—and he had no idea what he was in for.
“Look… she’s different, okay? It’s not about what she looks like—it’s about what she’ll become.”
Just… come meet her, but understand I warned you first. Smiling, I led the three of us—plus my mom—toward the vehicle, doing my best to keep the giggles at bay. I led them to where I’d put her. Holding her out in my hands, as an offering of my delight, I said, “Rob, meet the Queen.” And then I saw it—the horror. The color draining from his face.
“You spent fifty dollars on a stick?!” he cried, exasperated.
And honestly… I get it. Kinda.
“She’s not a stick!” I fired back protectively. “She’s the Queen of ALL Sticks!”
John was dying—full wheeze-laughing, side-clutching.
I scrambled to set her down gently—Queen of the Sticks—and pulled up a photo on my phone to show him the wonder she would one day become.
“It’s a stick! Planted in sand! You can’t be serious. Are you sure you didn’t get scammed?” he retorted.
“No, I know what I’m talking about here. It’s not a scam. She’s magnificent… you just don’t know her yet.”
He sighed—the sound of a defeated man shaking his head because he loved me, and the drug deal had been done.
On the way home, she sat front and center with a full view of the open road—Rob held her steady, shielding her from launching through the windshield or being smacked by Niki’s sleep-flailing feet in the back. Not because he liked her, but because he adores me. A true knight… reluctantly sworn into the Order of Botanical Nonsense. Like a reluctant midwife to a cactus baby.
I couldn’t resist. I snapped a few pictures and sent them to Natasha—and before I could even blink, my phone lit up with judgment.
“What is that?” “It’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen! That can’t be the same thing.”
I leaned in close to the stick and whispered, “Shhh. You’re beautiful on the inside.”
When we made it back to Georgia, she didn’t just come home—she arrived.
First plant in the Everglass House, obviously. She’s already claimed a shelf like it’s a throne and demands filtered light like it’s a spotlight.
Rob still walks by now and then, muttering, “It’s a stick.”
And I just smile, sipping my tea like I’m not about to win an award for Best Supporting Plant Parent.
Because one day, she’ll bloom. And on that glorious, fragrant day— I will demand an apology in writing. Notarized. Possibly framed.
Every farm-related crisis happens at the most inconvenient moments. Thunder rattles the house and storm clouds gather in the distance, a fence is down, flower boxes hang by a single nail. In the middle of preparing the farm for heavy winds and downpours, few things catch me off guard. I keep bale string in my back pocket, a stick or stump nearby to wedge a gate shut or push some chicken wire upright temporarily. I’m the rock star of rig-it-until-it’s-functional. A VIP in farm management.
Blue lotion on the fly to ward off infection for our farm baby-boo-boos, and “never a dull moment” is a religious motto I utter under my breath like a prayer to ward off psychotic incidents. The hay is always gone when you need it most, having slipped your mind to replenish it. Cat food in hand. Of course, the dog food’s missing when it’s too stormy to whisk off to the grocery store. Every once in a while, the crazy kicks up a notch, and I’ll be left in a field blinking, wondering what happened to the peace and quiet the morning began with.
Such was the case in one of the more head-scratching moments of farm-life insanity.
Georgia had been raining for weeks. One of the most unusual summers we’ve ever had—nonstop downpours during a time when our creek usually dries out. The flowers were stunted, my mood just as dark and sullen as the skies, and every walk in the big field continued to knock my spirits down. Plenty of identifiable floral stalks, but not a single bud. Hundreds of dollars in planted seeds—seeds I feared had drowned beneath the endless rain. I wanted to sob.
Yet there’s never any time to do such things. Another storm was coming, and Niki needed help with chores to get safely inside. Damaging wind, hail, and possible tornadoes on the horizon.
The weather doesn’t care how much we hate what it’s doing to our farm—it will rage onward. We’re just along for the ride. We keep those spare ties to hold everything together. Nikolai, disappointed by the lack of warm lake swims and golden sunshine, was equally moody but trying to make the best of it. Scrambling to feed everyone, searching the house for a morsel of canine buffet before the flood, I glanced out the window and saw Niki scowling at a patch of ground.
Shirtless, belly sticking out, hands on his hips like a pint-sized farmer and eyes full of concern. My brain was already annoyed because time was of the essence, and it was being wasted. A convenience we don’t have. I sighed, slipped on my shoes since he’d stolen my boots—again—and stepped out the door.
He was already marching up the hill, briskly making his way across the gravel driveway, a scowl etched into his face.
“What are you doing? We have to hurry, kid. Where’s your shirt?”
“I forgot it—Mom, I have to tell you something.”
“How do you forget a shirt? Caspian’s hay is going to make you itch forever. Maybe even rash. Hidden spiders. Might even run into Frank. That’s a big no-no. Shirt. Now.”
“But Mom—”
“Now.”
With a huff, he stomped up the steps to do as I asked while I sorted through our list of responsibilities. Next thing I knew, he was running back out of the house—wearing half of a respectable outfit and the other half pajamas.
“Mom, you have to listen to me. I think Moose ate half a person.”
I laughed. Moose is old, gray, the lover of the farm. A friend to all things feline. The neighborhood kids’ favorite—a child nanny on four legs with a big grin.
“There’s no way that’s possible. What do you mean by half a person?”
“I found… legs,” he whispered.
“What kind of legs? A lot of animals have legs, bud—you know this. Chicken legs? We’ve seen those a million times.”
“I know what chicken legs look like, Mom. And it’s too big to be a possum. Definitely not an armadillo. Seriously. They’re huge, very long, and… there’s two of them.” His eyes—terrified.
Meanwhile, I was mentally preparing for a crime scene. Thinking back to the days prior, when a hint of death had caught on the wind—but I wasn’t sure where it had come from. Brushing it off, I had gone about my business. Running errands, managing the to-do list.
Now I couldn’t stop wondering—what exactly do you do if you find a pair of legs? I should call the police, right? Does that mean they’ll bring reinforcements? Finish off my seedlings by trampling my garden? Put a pause on the greenhouse build?
I gulped. How had Moose dragged home man legs?
Looking up at the sky, I ran through every technique people use to preserve remains without contaminating anything. I thought back to every crime novel and podcast I’d ever consumed. My brain came up empty. Only a mental image of horror—blood everywhere. I swallowed the fluid rising in my gut.
“Oh, and Mom? They’re… hairy and… attached.”
Attached?
Farm life has prepared me for many things, but this wasn’t one of them. I was already in a mood that morning after walking past one carcass—my summer snapdragons, torn apart by Ripley, our German Shepherd. I was still heartbroken, but this was a new level. Two legs. Not roots. LEGS. Hairy legs! I wanted to throw up.
“Where are they?”
“You can’t miss them, Mom. Just keep walking straight.”
Should I grab a bottle of water? Vomit messes up crime scenes, right? My DNA on attached hairy man legs—or woman? Women can have hairy legs too. God, please don’t let someone kill me before I’ve shaved all my girl parts.
I crept forward—slowly, cautiously, bracing for horror. Moose sat beside them, proud—like, I totally brought home this delicious prize, Mom.
Then I burst out laughing.
He wasn’t wrong. They were ridiculously hairy legs. Man legs? Debatable, since the rest was missing. Human? No—thank God. The deer they belonged to was probably part of a crime scene somewhere else though. Poaching this time of year is a no-no—especially on my land.
Nothing like a side of botulism for brunch.
Did I clean them up?
HA! No. I left them for my wonderful husband. Bless his heart. I’ve cleaned up more carcasses on our farm than I care to count. When Rob’s home—I save the dirty work for him. Moose only kills things that threaten our flock or things she believes don’t belong around us. She works hard for her scrambled eggs with cheese. She earns every sprinkle of cheddar.
The storm inched closer. The chores got done just before the downpour. And I ended up on the sofa smiling. A reheated cup of tea in hand. I skipped the podcasts, because the best crime scenes… are the kind I live through.
Only on a farm do you go looking for a corpse, find a pair of hairy deer legs, and still have to finish feeding the dogs before the tornado hits.
Rob had a plan. A frugal, muscled, manure-laced plan. “Why would we pay for compost,” he asked with a straight face, “when we have tons of it sitting right there in Caspian’s pasture?”
He gestured toward the rolling expanse of the donkey kingdom like it was brimming with untapped riches. “It’s free!” he said. “Just a little labor.”
A little labor.
What Rob failed to mention was that this “free” manure came with a multi-step gauntlet of trials. First, you had to fill a wheelbarrow with the sacred poo—three full loads just to make a dent. Then came the real test: shoving it over the unforgiving lip of the gate, a move that required either brute force or a rotting shiplap ramp built out of splinters and one good heave.
Or, if you wanted to get fancy, you could slingshot it from the far side—right up against our Alcatraz-grade fence—and pray Caspian didn’t make a break for freedom.
And if by some miracle you managed not to baptize yourself in donkey droppings and drag your prize all the way up the gravel driveway to The Monet Garden—well, you could consider yourself divinely chosen. Blessed by heaven and flora.
Naturally, when Rob left on a work trip to Miami to fix helicopters (a much cleaner endeavor than air-frying manure), I took matters into my own dirt-smeared hands.
I added bags of pre-composted equine nuggets to the grocery list. At just over $2 a bag, it was practically a spa treatment—with no donkey braying in the background and no threat of slipping on hockey pucks.
I drove the car right up to the garden gate, lifted each blessed bag out like it was a newborn calf swaddled in black gold, and dropped it like it was fresh. No shovel wrestling. No donkey surveillance. No uphill martyrdom.
And the best part? I didn’t smell like a barn for three days afterward.
So yes, I technically committed a compost crime. But in the eyes of tired arms, overburdened wheelbarrows, and delicate nostrils everywhere… I am the hero this garden needed.
Let him think it came from the pasture. Let him believe I earned every shovel’s worth with biceps and glutes. I’ll never tell.
I am woman. I am gardener. I am compost criminal— and I have no regrets.
Because cooking is hard, Pinterest is a liar, and my microwave just died of natural causes.
I have a confession.
A sad, broken microwave has been sitting on my kitchen floor for at least a month now. I’ve seriously considered making funeral arrangements. There may already be a eulogy typed up and tucked away on my desktop in a folder labeled Upload to Facebook. Every morning, I pass it like a fallen comrade on my way to make tea in its replacement—an equally doomed soul I’ll probably kill in six months. I’m hard on microwaves. It’s a known issue.
I’d like to be one of those crunchy moms—you know, the ones who only feed their kids organic food, make their own baby purées and granola, and wear “earth mama” linen with pride. Truth is, someone once added me to a Facebook group like that just because I’m vegetarian. I had no idea what a crunchy mama even was. The moment I figured it out, it was unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe! Not a shred of guilt was shed.
I’m sure there’s a kombucha-brewing, free-range-egg-loving, apron-wearing whole-foods chef reading this right now, silently judging me through his sprouted almond milk latte. If OpenAI ever creates an in-house chef who’ll look inside my fridge and magically transform forgotten veggies into gourmet meals, I will personally Venmo them my entire grocery budget. No shame. Just send that baby next-day delivery. I’ll be the one at the door, cash in hand, yelling, “TAKE MY MONEY!”
Back before the internet was a fast-twitch muscle and we all had to dial up with a chorus of beeps and static, I once asked my mom if I could microwave a potato—poke holes in it like we did for baking, only quicker. She told me no, because she said it wasn’t possible. Not because it was the truth, but because she didn’t like them that way. She wanted the full 45-minute oven bake. So I believed her. For years. Never questioned it.
Then, in my twenties, I was watching my grandmother’s twelve-year-old adopted daughter for the summer. We were chatting about dinner and I mentioned wanting a fully loaded baked potato—but complained about how long those took to make. She stared at me like I had six heads.
“You know you can just… put it in the microwave, right?”
She blew my entire mind.
I immediately called my mom, outraged. My culinary innocence had been manipulated. She just laughed. Laughed. “Why didn’t you Google it?” she said, completely unbothered.
And that, my friends, is where the story begins.
One day, Pinterest blessed me with a glorious photo of freshly baked bread—golden, buttery, heaven incarnate. I called my best friend. “We have to make this.” We gathered the ingredients, filled a cart, and headed to her kitchen. I was extremely helpful. I floured my hands occasionally and patted the dough like I used to pat my son’s back when I burped him as a baby.
We needed a DIY broiler. The internet said a pan inside another pan with a lid could work. She had a glass one and assured me we’d be fine—if we were very careful. We set the timer, slid the precious loaf inside, and checked on it regularly like doting new parents.
Then came the smell.
When the scent of burning reached tear-inducing intensity, she grabbed the oven mitts and barked something about boiling water. I missed the full instruction. The Pyrex shattered. Loudly. It exploded with such drama, it sprayed glass from her oven all the way into the living room around the corner. It sounded like a crime scene gunshot victim.
My husband loves to tease me about “hiring her as backup” so he gets decent food. She now waves from her porch with a muffin tin in hand whenever we pass—God bless her. She’s been adopted as family now.
The other day, my son looked at me, serious as ever, and asked, “Do all moms cook for their husbands when the husbands are perfectly capable of doing it themselves?”
I laughed. “I’m not all moms. Don’t hold them to my standards.”
Which is exactly why, when the microwave died, I just stood there. Defeated. Nikolai looked up at me and whispered, “Are we going to die of starvation if Daddy doesn’t replace it?”
On our wedding night—yes, we slept inside the church—Rob and I woke up ravenous. We padded barefoot into the church kitchen and peeked inside the fridge.
Milk. Eggs. Bread.
“That’s it. We’re doomed,” I said, already grieving.
Rob laughed and made French toast. I was floored. French toast was something I believed only IHOP was licensed to make. He thought I was kidding—until the nervous laughter gave me away. He married a woman who could not cook. Not even toast. And I’ve defiantly burned water more than once.
But I learned. Eventually.
I still hate cooking, and Rob still asks if I’m making dinner every time he hears the smoke detector. But my kid will brag that I make better food than his dad. I’ve got a mean vinaigrette game, killer soups, heavenly desserts, and I can build a sandwich like an artist. As long as it takes under thirty minutes? I’m golden.
So no, I’m not the crunchy mom. I’m the tofu-nugget, splash-pad, microwave-eulogizing mama. I love salads because they’re refreshingly easy and taste delicious—not because someone told me they’re holy. And when I bring home a new microwave, I bless it with more hope than Pope Francis at Easter Mass.
Lord, give me the strength to endure when Nikolai comes running into the room to tell me he accidentally started a small fire inside it.
May this one outlive its ancestor regardless. May its spirit be strong. And may it heat my tea until kingdom come.
A not-so-love story featuring nudity, betrayal, and livestock.
Frank is an asshole. Honestly, the moment a man tries to defend something that pees on him and lives in a box? Red flag. Immediate eviction. I don’t care how many mice it eats. My husband tried to convince me otherwise, and after Rob knocked on the door to our own house, I should have seen the dead giveaway coming.
“Look at him, babe! He was so afraid, he hid his little head so he didn’t have to see me. I found him hanging out in the shed, curled up in a cardboard bunker!”
I squinted suspiciously. The guilty often look innocent. I would know—and Rob should too.
It reminded me of the last time I had played innocent—big eyes, fake shock, the whole act. Rob had walked in and caught me mid-plant smuggling operation, and I’d tried to lie my way out with the confidence of a toddler covered in cookie crumbs.
“Where did that new rose bush come from?”
“What rose bush?”
Rob pointed at the one I had definitely bought in the Lowe’s garden section. “That rose bush!”
“You haven’t seen this seven-footer before? She’s obviously always been here. I sure worry about your memory sometimes, love,” I said as I shoved a few more plants under the porch with my foot so he couldn’t bear witness to them.
He knew. We both did. Which was how I understood his new “friend” was already a troublemaker. And I also didn’t want it anywhere near me.
“Aww, poor guy peed on me.”
I wanted to vomit. “Attempt to let it touch me and it won’t live to see tomorrow.”
“You can’t do that—they’re helpful to the farm!”
“The only good one is a dead one,” I argued.
Nikolai came racing toward us and all hope of running it over with the car vanished.
“Ohhh!!! Where did you find him? Can we keep him?”
Please. Lord, no. Don’t wish this on me.
“Kinda! He can live here and you can name him if you want. What should we call him?”
“Ummm… how about Frank?”
My house has a long history of hosting creatures that should come with warning labels and their own bail bondsman.
I. Find. Everything. Missing lizards Niki had misplaced in the car, frogs where they shouldn’t belong, bugs the size of Chihuahuas that had forced me into learning karate just to win a death match. I knew I would find Frank. Not if. When.
There had been a lot of mice in the horse trailer where we kept our feed bin. So naturally, Rob and Nikolai had lovingly rehomed him from the shed to the location I used more than anything else… to fatten up.
And of course, I had been left out of the loop. Why would anyone want to clue mom in?
Months had passed with me peacefully swaddled in a false sense of security, until one morning when I went to grab the horse scooper to feed the chickens. It was nearing the end of summer, as warm days crept into cooler evenings. Sunlight stretched across the greenery, birds cheerily gathering and stashing seeds, while I hummed a tune with a skip in my step.
Creaky hinges groaned. The door opened to dance with light, and I grabbed the feed bag.
Do you remember that game with the little clown—or sometimes a weasel in a box? You’d crank the handle, wind it up with dread in your gut, bracing for the inevitable—
All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock…
POP! went the weasel.
My hand reached into the bag and Frank launched out. At. My. Face.
Black. Slithering. Fangs.
I shrieked in horror and ran up the driveway, foot pounding pavement, screaming for my life. Stripping naked for the neighbors like I was starring in a one-woman matinee performance of Snake! The Musical… all to be sure he hadn’t found a way to attach himself to me. And then I made a vow to buy new chicken feed instead of sticking my hand into the old one ever again.
Izzy had been farm-sitting for me while I was on a trip with Rob. She had gone to the well-house to fill Caspian’s water bucket, and as she reached for the spindly blue knob… there was Frank. He exploded from the shadows at her as she screamed for mercy, fell on her rear end, and ran to her car to call me for an explanation.
I wish I could tell you it stopped there. But it didn’t.
One of my best friends found Frank hiding underneath the large, shallow black water bucket I had left out for the chickens when she went to refill it for their daily gulp-and-splash routine. He had chased her to our porch.
As if that wasn’t enough, Frank decided to up his game. Rob had been searching our old Ford truck glove box for a part he had stashed. The door flipped open, papers began rustling on their own… and then came the sound of a rattler. Rob had snagged a screwdriver for protection, heart racing. A flash of scales. A jolt so sudden and visceral he forgot to breathe for a few seconds.
Frank became an unintentional kebab.
Injured but not near death, Rob used his military first-aid skills to patch him up. He petted him. Whispered words of comfort and healing. The man even apologized to his reptilian mastermind. And Frank didn’t even own a rattle.
I couldn’t have been more appalled. Disgusted, even. And then Frank had been released, to commit more acts of trespassing and treason.
A few weeks ago, a ghost skin of scales the size of an anaconda was found and pulled out of the headlight within the Colorado farm truck we used regularly. I wanted to cry—because I knew Frank would return. And his last known sighting had been the well-house incident from Izzy’s account.
I had begged Rob to hook up the hoses for me before he left for work. They were long enough to hydrate the roses, Caspian, and some of the farm dogs, without needing to haul water.
I walked out to the field, ankles bare. Chest, arms, and face exposed to the breeze. Exploring the edges of the garden and preparing to pull the hose and press the button that would send water shooting out. The hose was coiled like a spring and I was about to launch… my anger through the speaker phone at my wonderful husband—on behalf of forgetting. The ends were unattached and unattended.
I had to go in. Turn the blue lever. And pray I was alone.
I. Had. No. Choice.
Honestly, if anyone deserves sainthood, it’s me—for not burning the well house down and pretending it was lightning.
I made noise. I pleaded for my sanity as I stomped closer toward the cement brick walls. Swallowed bile. Terrified. Replayed the time I had found him tucked into a hay bale I was pulling apart to use as mulch for the garden bed—when he was nearly in my hands.
The flashbacks crept in as I edged closer, cursing my husband, cursing the day Frank slithered into our lives and refused to leave.
POP! Goes the weasel.
I heard a rustle as I reached for the knob—something moving quickly. I begged my hands to turn fast as my rib cage thrummed.
A lurch. A movement I didn’t get a good look at had me reeling, running backward—unknowingly straight through the same patch of poison ivy I’d already face-planted into earlier at the well house. Which was probably now smeared on my ankles, arms, neck, chest… maybe even my lips.
Doing my best owl impression—mouth rounded in a panicked oooh, eyes scanning the grass—I once again stripped for the neighbors as Nikolai yelled:
“Hey Mom! I need you for something!”
Poison ivy oil sets in fast. The quicker you get your clothes off, the better your odds. So I danced, trying not to touch my face—except my ear itched from a mosquito. I stupidly shooed it away and touched my lobe.
Arms waving, running in floral tennis shoes with alabaster thunder thighs sliding sweatily together. I made it to the house without eating the rocks on the driveway, or getting bit by Frank. Looking like a possessed scarecrow mid-bender knowing he was still out there somewhere.
Watching me. Laughing. Mocking. Pissing me off for all the damage he had caused.
Whether he had been there or imagined—I blamed him for everything.
Because Frank is an asshole. Who deserves what he gets. Rat snake or not.
Niki was still behind me yelling, “MOM! MOM! MOM I NEED YOU!” While I was yelling, “After the shower, kid!”
One shock to the system and a sudsy Dawn dish-soap dip later, I thought I had it licked. 12 hours went by—clear. 24 hours—nothing. Day two?
A steroid shot in the ass for a poison ivy reaction was not what I had signed up for.
Frank. Is. An asshole.
And you never know where he’ll show up next. I’m already avoiding the truck where his skin was found… dangling like a promise, out of the headlight.
And if you see him?Tell Frank I’m coming with car keys in hand.
I was determined to hang those flower boxes. I wanted to see the fruit of my labor blooming right outside my windows—colorful, wild, and just how I imagined them. It was the last thing I thought about before sleep and the first thing on my mind when I woke up. What to plant, what colors to pair, what joy they’d bring.
Relentless. On a mission.
So off we went—Izzy and I, in her SUV. The same SUV that, unbeknownst to us, would die in the parking lot before the trip was over.
As we pulled in, Izzy asked, “Do we need a cart?” I gave her a look. “Izzy. We’re here for me. I’m buying flowers. Have you met me?” “Cart,” she nodded. “Maybe two.”
We wandered toward the hardware section, me running through my mental list. Rob had taken the electric screwdriver to work. I didn’t trust myself with a nail gun. That left me with my old reliable: the hammer. And let’s be honest—some women walk into these places like warriors. I am not one of them.
She flagged down a bearded employee. “Excuse me, sir? Where’s the nail aisle?”
“Depends,” he said without missing a beat. “What size you lookin’ for?”
I, with full confidence and zero clarity, replied: “Big ones.”
He blinked. “There’s a lot of big ones. How big?”
“Really big ones.” I held up a finger like I was measuring some sacred relic.
Izzy started laughing quietly behind me.
“What are you planning to do with them?” he asked.
“Bang them in,” I said. “All the wood.”
Izzy snorted.
“How big is the wood?” he asked, still trying to hold it together.
“It’s big,” I said, realizing too late how far I’d gone. “There’s several of them… I’ve gotta bang ’em in deep.”
Izzy’s face was red. She had actual tears running down her cheeks. And there I was, a married woman, miming hammer motions in the middle of the aisle, while this poor employee tried to stay professional.
He cleared his throat. “So you need nails long enough to bang the wood in deep enough for your project.”
“Yes!” I said, too far in to turn back now. “Exactly. They gotta be hung right, you know?” I gasped. “The flower boxes!”
He chuckled. “Then maybe… start with something smaller than railroad spikes.”
Izzy leaned in, whispering, “You know, it’s not the size of the nails, LaShelle. It’s the motion of the ocean.”
I didn’t miss a beat: “Izzy, as a married woman, I can promise you—that’s a lie.”
We barely made it to the flower section without collapsing from laughter.
But the joke was on me. When I got home, I found out exactly why nails that size were a terrible idea. They were too long, too thick, too wrong for the project and my poor flower box paid the price.
To top it off, my best friend Natasha decided to christen my carpentry failure with the world’s smallest hammer as a Mother’s Day gift.
I’m keeping it forever. Every flower box has a backstory—and sometimes, it involves a lot of banging.
“Four generations, reduced to three.” The phrase kept replaying. Tears skipped down my face while I attempted to quiet trembling hands. I lugged the carry on bags over my shoulder and encouraged Nikolai to keep up.
Grief is a funny thing, it likes to bring back memories to intensify pain. “Do you remember when Niki asked you to book a flight so he could ride in an airplane?” Grief asked with a snicker. A scene of my son standing in the kitchen less than a week prior popped into my brain to twist the blade that was already impaling my heart. He wanted to go on vacation.
“This isn’t what either of us had in mind” I mumble to no one in particular.
I had tucked my laptop between bare essentials in my backpack but I couldn’t find strength to pull it out. Once we reached our terminal and finally settled in after boarding, I leaned back into my assigned seat on the airplane feeling hopeful sleep might come to me this time. It didn’t. Instead, an outline of the blog post I wasn’t ready to write was being narrated by an unknown force from within.
Four generations, reduced to three. What is it about holiday’s and tragedies? The day after I found out about my grandmother’s cancer… I scrounged up some change to buy my favorite tea to sip while I sat in the parking lot looking for flights. I ran into a wonderful friend of mine before I even made it to the counter. The look on her face told me something was wrong and I knew she needed to talk.
“The doctor found cancer in my uterus.”
Grief was laughing at me again. She could hardly get the words to leave her lips. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her own children but somehow… she she chose to tell me. One of my best friends died of cancer on Christmas day last year. My grandfather also passed away around Christmas time. There I was connecting my cell phone to the coffee shop WiFi to book flights when an overwhelming sense of deja-vu slammed into me. All because another friend was sick and one of my favorite people seemed to be next.
I wanted to hug her close before leaving to soothe us both but she wouldn’t let me. The fear of breaking down in front of her employees weighed heavily. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I could keep it together myself. When I made my way back to my car I slipped into the drivers seat to sob where no one would see me. Life is unfair. As the minuets ticked by, I reminded myself that I would have to man up soon in order to relay the information about my grandmother to my son for the first time.
How do you explain the gravity of sickness and finality of death to a seven year old? Farm life taught me well but I still wasn’t prepared for this. I held my boy in my arms and listened to him gasp for air while his shoulders rattled against my rib cage as he wept. Who would I call when I couldn’t remember the list of ingredients to a recipe? Who would I talk to after having an argument with my mom? Who was going to be able to tell me stories about our family history?
She helped raise me when my mom was too young to be a mom. She kissed my skinned knees, taught me how to compost, instilled my love of roses and all things floral. I’ve watched her since I was a baby in the early morning hours just before sunlight graced the earth as she gingerly turned the pages of a well-worn leather Bible. She was the one who taught me the most about faith and forgiveness.
In my darkest hour when I had a brush with death, my grandma called me around two in the morning to tell me that I was in her thoughts and on her heart. She gave me sermons over the years not with words, but by the way she’s lived her life. Whenever she knew I needed comfort… I was given a front row seat to her private conversations with Jesus. My flight to see her was made so I could hold her hand before surgery in case I had to say goodbye.
I wanted to see her smile and hear her laugh more than I wanted to fly out for a funeral. Unfortunately, nothing brings out the worst in family quite like a crisis. A group chat between cousins, aunts, and uncles wouldn’t stop chiming with notifications from my cell. Petty arguments ensued about who knew her best, who was the closest to her, and how to handle her medical care. The saga overshadowed the gravity of the situation.
I woke up early to prepare the farm for my absence. I soaked feed buckets for Harlow (my horse), I threw extra hay to our donkey and I tossed plenty of scratch to fill the bellies of our flock. Rob (my husband) was making the drive home from another state to take over for me while I was gone. He had been fixing a life-flight helicopter when I told him I needed his help.
In the red beams of my vehicle’s tail lights, I tackled chores and tried to remind myself to breathe. Yet after loading luggage into the trunk, when I went to shut the gate… I heard a crunching sound. It didn’t take long to realize my cell phone had slipped into the pathway of the latch. All of my itinerary information, my contacts for traveling, and my banking apps vanished moments before I had a flight to catch. Pure panic set in.
Thankfully Nikolai had an emergency cell phone on hand which I was able to use in a pinch. The family bickering came to a halt and I like to think God knew I needed a break. Instead of reading messages that made my stomach churn, my focus was exactly where it needed to be… on seeing her.
Half asleep and standing on the curb outside the phoenix airport, my brother pulled us into a much needed bear hug. After a five hour layover and a full day of travel, Nikolai couldn’t keep his head from nodding off. We crashed on my big, little brother’s sofa. The next morning Austin (my brother) took us out for breakfast and replaced my cell phone with a shiny new one.
180 miles and one left turn until I finally set foot on the ranch my grandparent’s had built together. With nothing more than love and a dream it was encompassed by an eerie dense cloud of fog. I couldn’t help hearing echos of hoof beats from horses I once loved. I could almost smell the ripe tomatoes I use to pull off the vine inside my Papa’s greenhouse and feel the acidic juice as it dripped off my chin. I thought about the Rough Collies we raised and summers spent dodging monsoons. Four generations and the desert would probably reclaim the land we borrowed.
The small town hospital hardly looked like a hospital at all. We almost passed it up before turning into the parking lot. “She has three types of cancer.” The doctor said when I finally had a moment to speak with him. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and process everything he was attempting to tell me.
A tumor in her abdomen, colon cancer, and a tumor near the main artery next to her heart. I stood outside her room trying to catch my breath. I hate the smell of sterile environments. Three kinds of cancer, three generations. My eye lids were puffy from sobs I couldn’t contain, my soul felt defeated, and all I wanted more than anything else was another ten years with her.
Being faithful requires the ability to put your fears away so God can carry them for you. While I was terrified, my grandma was filled with peace. She opened her Bible before surgery the same way she did every morning. She looked weak and frail but her spirit was full of strength. She wanted to live. She always told me that one of her big goals in life was to make it to her one hundredth birthday.
As a family we sat in the hospital cafeteria nervously playing board games while we waited for an update. Someone won, someone lost, and I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted to hide in my little house tucked away between mountains among the forest.
Sometimes the hopelessness in life gives you tunnel vision. When it’s too painful to hope for something better, you stop trying. You lean into what you think is inevitable and you miss the miraculous events unfolding before your eyes.
I was the second person to see her after surgery. I kissed her hands and bossed the nurses around to keep my beautiful grandmother comfortable. I made sure she had the best nausea medicine. I fluffed her pillows, filled a Styrofoam cup with ice chips, and wrote our phone numbers on the white board in case anything changed.
She was lively, her eyes were mischievous, and she laughed! The charge nurse slipped in to check on us. He was a balding man who called her “young lady” which made her scoff.
“I’m going to climb ALL the stairs in Bisbee.” She stated with a matter of fact.
The nurse looked to me with amusement. “Don’t you think you should try to heal first?”
“I will heal and then I’m going to live. I’m going to travel to see my kids and I’m going to hike the stairs in Bisbee. You don’t have to believe me, but I’m going to do it.”
“She’s not joking. She’s the toughest woman I know and she means what she says. She’ll do it.” I said with a smile.
Miracles happen all the time, even when it feels as if there is no way out. The surgeon who told us to expect the worst… removed all of the cancer in her body with the exception of the one near her heart. Not only is my grandmother recovering, she’s thriving and we get as much time with her as God will allow.
My friend at the coffee shop had a complete hysterectomy. Her tumor ended up being benign. Her wonderful children get to keep their mother and she didn’t end up in need of chemo or radiation treatments. She’s back to working part time while she recovers.
Miracles happen, sometimes you just need faith.
Notes from the Author:
A lot of things have happened in my life the past two months that forced me to put my blog on the back burner for a little bit. I had to prioritize my family, my friends, and my farm but I never gave up on writing. I had to give myself grace for not being able to do it all and handle one crisis at a time. I hope you’ll forgive me for being away so long! I’m still sorting out how to juggle things better and the more I write, the more you’ll understand why those things happen sometimes. I love my fellow bloggers so much. I can’t wait to get caught up with the friendships I’ve made here so I can nourish them again. All my love,
I’ll never forget the day Nikolai came home and asked me if I thought he was stupid. Tears were trickling down his cheeks, his mouth was twisted in emotional agony, and his sunshine blue eyes had turned into wells of pain. The mother bear within was ready to rip someone apart.
“Kids can be brutal.” I soothed as I gathered him into my arms and tried to hide bitter tears of my own.
The ride home had been filled with silence. I kept asking about his day but the set of his jaw spoke volumes. The moment we walked through our front door his words came tumbling out. I sat with him in my lap, little fingers curled around mine and listened for him to tell me the entire sordid tale.
Nikolai (Doodles as we call him) had been sitting at his desk, pencil in hand when the teacher asked him to write his name at the top of the page. His mind went blank. He began to fidget and get nervous.
“Don’t you know how to write your own name? What are you stupid or something?” His young classmate sneered as all eyes turned to look at him.
Nikolai froze. He didn’t know how to react. He just sat there gripping his pencil until his knuckles turned white.
“You ARE stupid! Who doesn’t know how to write their own name? Stupid people, that’s who!” The girl taunted.
Thankfully his best friend whispered into his ear “It’s okay Nikolai. I’ll do it for you.”
Unfortunately the damage had been done and the little girl began to make every day a nightmare from that moment on. She called him names, singled him out, humiliated him, and alienated Nikolai from his classmates. Meanwhile, I wrote his teacher on a regular basis in an attempt to resolve it. His seat was moved somewhere else in the classroom… but nothing helped. My happy bubbly boy was being pulled into depression.
I spent most mornings begging him to go to school. I gave him pep talks and let him take a stuffed animal with him so he wouldn’t feel alone. He carried a stuffed fox lovingly called Foxy everywhere he went. Yet the boy who normally never meet a stranger began to have trouble making friends. Eventually he stopped trying and I grew increasingly concerned. He was sad constantly.
“Please mom, please don’t make me go. I hate school. I really don’t want to go. I don’t feel safe. Kids hate me.”
I would sit in the car, put my face in my hands and cry about forcing him to be there. I had meetings with the principal, I took him to do as many fun things as possible but nothing made an impact. More than being bullied, Nikolai had been struggling to learn. I knew in the depth of my soul that my son had a learning disability. No matter how many times his teacher and I went over words and letter sounds, the boy wasn’t grasping them.
Second grade came and brought new beginnings… but the battle ground was much of the same. More bullies and the struggle to learn was forever present as it hung like darkness over his head. Outside our favorite park one afternoon, my husband had a conversation with our son about our farm animals and their mutual desire to get another dog. Our beautiful Moose has been living in her golden years. She’s gray around the muzzle and we give her pain medicine for arthritis. She is forever the light of our lives since we rescued her from the Humane Society in Atlanta (long before we moved to our little farm in the woods).
Tallulah is my service dog. She loves to play with Nikolai but she gets overly excited and her size sometimes knocks him over. While they’re two peas in a pod… Niki isn’t allowed to feed her or walk her. Tulla’s job lies in helping me monitor my health and she takes it seriously.
Nikolai wanted a dog. The more I thought about it and the struggles my son had been enduring… the more I got on board. Plus, I was outnumbered two to one! I spent a good amount of time researching because it’s not easy for a dog to fit into the established crew on our farm. The right dog needed to be outgoing but friendly. They would need to be able to get along with Moose and Tallulah, while learning to live around chickens and livestock.
Most of all… the right kind of dog needed to be small enough for an (almost) eight year old boy to handle but have a big enough personality to be a best friend for life. All of which is a rather tall order for a dog. It took a lot of internet browsing on my computer at the local coffee shop to find somewhere to take Nikolai to look for a dog while checking off our primary requirements.
When my husband and I picked Nikolai up from school, we didn’t tell him where we were going. The winding mountain drive to Blue Ridge forced us to squash his questions about our plans for the afternoon under the premise that we needed to run some errands (which wasn’t a lie). Since we had already agreed to get him a dog, Nikolai sat in the back seat excitedly discussing how he had told his entire class.
It wasn’t until a little pal named Einstein came across my Facebook feed which put the Humane Society of Blue Ridge Georgia on my radar. The almost all white dog looked similar to a baby Yoda with his cocky little ears. He was too cute to pass up an introduction. The bonus being H.S.B.R had a couple of other dogs for us to see as well (just in case).
“Are we at a doctor’s office?” He asked when we pulled up outside a red brick building. His small face etched in confusion.
“Lets go inside and find out. Tell the lady at the desk that you would like to meet Einstein.” I smiled feeling a little tearful.
The beauty of looking for a forever friend is keeping an open mind. Sometimes the dog you have your heart set on or imagine yourself with… isn’t the one that’s right for you. Einstein wasn’t a good fit for Nikolai. He was fearful, and nervous after having been abused by kids. Although Niki loved him right away… it was clear to me that Nikolai wasn’t what the sweet guy needed. It took some convincing on my part but Doodles agreed to meet the second contender… a scrappy six month old pup the Humane Society lovingly named, Dunn.
From the moment this large eared, funny faced little dog walked into Nikolai’s life… it was as if the two of them were made for one another. He bounced his way into Niki’s arms, licked his jaw and Nikolai erupted into a fit of giggles.
“This is my dog!” Nikolai proclaimed proudly, and as if he always had been Nikolai’s dog… the two of them walked to our car together.
On the playground after school, Nikolai was surrounded by children. His puppy (who never meets a tiny human he doesn’t like) had his stubby tail going wild. Kids were laughing, wiping slobber off their palms and cheeks, while Nikolai’s wing-man helped him make more friends than he knew what to do with. The tough days he had at school were meet with kind eyes and a playful gesture when he came home.
The nightmares about the man who broke into our house, were soothed by having this little dog rest beside him. Nikolai isn’t afraid to be alone in his bedroom anymore which is exactly what I was hoping for. He isn’t afraid of the dark anymore either because if something is amiss… his partner will let him know.
The learning disability may always be there. I myself have struggled with dyslexia since I was young. Yet the burdens people face in life aren’t quite as heavy when they have a friend to share it with. There’s something spectacular about dogs… they are capable of loving unconditionally. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what you struggle with, they only care about who you are as a person.
As I sat scribbling down notes for a blog post… Nikolai asked me to brainstorm names for his (at that moment) future dog. I thoughtfully suggested that we call his new friend-to-be Scribbles. He pondered for a moment, and with a huge grin… exclaimed that Scribbles was perfect (and he was).
Notes from the author:
* Scribble’s introduction to Tallulah & Moose, and the rest of the farm couldn’t have gone any better. All three dogs are the best of friends.
* Apologies for not being on time with my post this week, I skipped last week because it was my birthday, and I was late this week because Niki gave me a cold virus from school. I’ll be back to posting regularly on Tuesday’s at 10:00 AM this next week. Thanks for being patient with me!
* If you haven’t seen the post my friend Jen from BosssyBabe did about me and my little farm blog… you’re missing out! I answer a ton of questions about how I got to where I am, why I write the way I do, and what drives me. Take a moment to stop by and check her out plus… her blog is down right incredible so read some of her other posts as well. She’s one of my favorites!
Nikolai, Moose, and two of our six cats Tetley the calico, and Mousey the tuxedo Moose & Scribbles on our morning walksTallulah & Scribbles passed out after an hour long play session The day Scribbles & Nikolai became partnersA bright future & an autumn walk Watching me scribble blog notes while waiting for his kid to get home from school.
Most people are shocked when I tell them that we don’t have access to internet out here. I must be honest; it was a learning curve for me as well when we first moved to our little farm. It’s not because we don’t want to pay for it, but rather because no working internet provider will bring it this far out of the way. Our town Facebook page is littered with posts about how the only satellite that provides internet is down time and time again.
The town grocery store puts up a sign asking people to pay in cash and Nikolai’s school has internet access issues too. When you live deep in the woods like we do, there’s no point in paying for something that rarely works. Large pines, poplars, and oak tree’s spread their limbs and reach to the heavens causing the signal to be disrupted. It’s almost as if nature is blocking the path for a reason.
The more I read the news and catch up with old friends on Facebook, the more thankful I become for the interruption. My ability to get into stupid debates when something rubs me the wrong way is limited to moments when out of nowhere my phone suddenly receives two bars of LTE. As soon as I’m invested in riveting conversation… the moment has passed and I’m unable to respond again. Instead, I use my phone as a paperweight. I listen to Audible, pull up pre-downloaded books on Kindle, or just leave it to charge while I spend the afternoon in my garden.
We don’t live “off grid” but I’ve come to enjoy my life being this way. When I want to upload a blog post and catch up with other writers, I must drive to the coffee shop to connect or wait until I need to go get something from one of the bigger towns nearby. I often pull up Facebook while I’m picking up feed for my animals. In other words, I schedule time to use the internet and my time is limited.
About six months ago a man came and knocked on my door to ask me if I wouldn’t mind putting my dogs up so he could access the powerlines. His bald head was a glossy glow in the morning light, and he had the kind of nose that was thick through the bridge but flat around the nostrils. He was doing research for an internet company who was determined to “bring knowledge and connection” to rural towns that are hard to reach. Apparently, there is a government contract for this kind of thing.
“Knowledge and connection.” I think towns like mine have more to teach the world about knowledge and connection than the millions of people who live in large cities and never look up from their phones. I’ve read articles that detail the problems that social media has caused on the mental health of billions of people. So much so, that humanity likes to boast about taking social media breaks (which I have done myself).
One of my biggest accomplishments was the time I deleted all my social media apps from my phone for six months. I didn’t miss a single thing. I did, however, enjoy more phone calls from loved ones. They made my day burn brighter. Friends reached out with cellphone numbers so we could chat and there was far less confusion about the tone in which something was taken because it was a lot easier to clarify misunderstandings.
The gentlemen from the internet company asked me if I was excited at the possibility of getting internet. His brown eyes lit up with the prospect of gifting something of such great importance to most people. I attempted to smile.
“Not really!” I replied. His bushy salt and pepper eyebrows furrow at my response, so I elaborated.
“Why bother with that when I have all of this?” I reached my arms wide to gesture to our 11.2 acres.
He didn’t get it. My niece and nephew who live near Chicago didn’t get it either when they first came to visit. It took time for them to see the value in how we do things out here. I took them hiking on our farm, drove them to see an amazing waterfall, and took them to an empty field where they could learn to drive for the first time. The learning curve hit them harder than it did for me. Yet by the time they had to go home… they were wishing they had what we have here.
It all comes back to connection and real connection doesn’t come from a screen. It comes from immersing yourself into your environment. The feeling of your bare feet touching solid earth, seeing a creek turn into a waterfall, holding hands with the ones you love, and listening to the soothing voice of a friend. Salivating over an amazing meal and mentally stimulating your brain with conversation that bubbles over into laughter.
The internet can’t provide substance for you and knowing a lot about the world is meaningless without experience. People were social distancing long before Covid ever came into play, we all just got better at it. It’s a lot harder to handle the news when you’ve lost sight of things that have real value, and we can’t expect to change people’s points of view without first being able to connect with them.
Upon returning home from our amazing family vacation and having the alone time to sit and reflect on everything I have learned… I continue to come back to the topic of connection. It doesn’t take living in the middle of nowhere to find it (though I truly believe that it helps prevent us from slipping into old habits). You can limit your time social distancing exactly where you are.
My hope in writing this is that these thoughts of mine will touch someone who is as exhausted as I am. That perhaps they will read what was on my heart and have a desire to take a leap into connection with me. Challenge yourself to put your phone down, to limit your internet access and use the extra quality time this week to read a book that shakes you. Grab a loved one and hike to somewhere you’ve never been. You don’t have to be in shape for it… Lord knows I’m not!
If you’ve decided to commit to doing this with me… I want to read about it! Write me a comment to tell me what worked for you and what didn’t. You don’t have to make it an everyday thing, just circle one day a week on your calendar. If you can’t do a full day, try an hour or two. Contact some friends or family and see if they can’t meet up with you or give gardening a go. Most importantly of all… share how this challenge made you feel, not just with me but with others.
Nikolai standing in the rain on an empty mountain road. WiFi free, making connections My usual work spot is in a quaint little place down the road from my farm but since Izzy is working today… I popped by to brighten her day and say hello.
Side note: I had originally planned on posting more about my incredible vacation today but in light of what happened with Canada loosing internet service… I felt this was a better fit for this week. I’ll post amazing images, videos, and stories next week instead. Hopefully I didn’t disappoint anyone!
As a family we talked about him often. The crazy adventures, his knack for stealing Rob’s tools, and all the times he snuck his way into the house. It had been at least two years since we heard honking echoing through our farm. We discussed getting another goose regularly but for some reason the timing never quite worked out the way we hoped it would, and we knew that life without Aspen wouldn’t be the same.
On a random Friday afternoon after having tackled farm chores, we decided to make a trip into town for essentials and extra feed for the farm. We had been hauling things to the nearby garbage dump so rather than take our usual route, we knew it would be more direct to take the back roads. The long stretches of farmland between scenic mountains and sunshine did my heart good. I let the windows slide down to the rim so the breeze could dance over my throbbing fingers and ease the pain from the injury I had obtained a couple weeks prior. The rolling hills were carpeted in rich shades of green and dappled with day lilies while the last of the spring blooms put on a show of pink and purple hues.
It’s funny how quickly an ordinary afternoon can become something more extraordinary. Rob was sitting in the driver’s seat with one hand on the steering wheel while the other caressed my non-broken limbs. His amber eyes sparkled, and he threw a cocky grin at me. We were secretly listening to Nikolai drift off in his own little world. Wiggly legs dangled over his booster seat; he had been making up lyrics to songs that he wrote himself. Something Niki said about redheads being dangerous had my husband and I roaring with laughter. I intended to write it down. I do this a lot to savor his words for a later date, but I was interrupted by a sign advertising the sale of a flock of chickens.
Two large cages filled with birds had caught Rob’s attention and since we could always use more chickens, it captured my attention as well. It happened so suddenly that in the middle of typing Niki’s lyrics, I dropped my phone between the seats. While fumbling to find my cellphone, Rob made a three-point turn to get us back onto the highway. My hand was already hovering over the buckle to release my seatbelt before my husband had the opportunity to throw the car into park once we had arrived at our rerouted destination. I was eager to leap from my seat so I could stretch my legs but more than that, I was curious over how much the asking price would be. If it wasn’t too outrageous, I figured we would probably load up the car and take them all home with us.
I lifted a hand to shade my eyes from the sun so I could see better. Three menacing dogs snapped at me behind a chain link fence that blocked the front door. I couldn’t decide where the best point of entry to ring the doorbell might be. Was it behind the dogs? I wasn’t about to jump the fence to find out. That’s when I heard a sound that instinctively had me snapping my neck to locate the source. Underneath a shade tree was a large coop and five long necks that were straining to get a better look at me.
“HONK! Honk, honk, HONK!” I gasped and slapped my good hand across the car window so Rob would roll it down to speak with me.
“Do you hear them?!” I asked excitedly
“They have geese?” He asked with wide eyes
“They do!“
“See if they will sell them! Forget about the Chickens, try to convince them to let us buy a goose.”
A young dark-skinned boy in his early teens emerged from the woods in a dusty red golf cart and inky shorts. His flip flops made a sloppy sound as he was walking towards me after parking. Yet his eyes were bright, and his smile was more inviting than the dogs who kept him company.
“Can I help you?” He asked inquisitively
“Hey there! I saw your sign along the road for chickens, I was wondering how much you wanted for them.” I asked even though at this point I couldn’t have cared less about the chickens.
“Ten dollars a bird.”
“Hmm” I responded, “what about the geese? Are they for sale by chance?”
“The geese? I’d have to ask my parents, but I might be able to sell one to you.”
“How much?”
“I’m not sure… twenty dollars sound fair?”
Twenty dollars wasn’t a fair price. Most goslings in our area cost around fifty to seventy dollars but I wasn’t about to question him. Instead, we would bring extra funds with us just in case he changed his mind. With that, an agreement was made, and we left to locate an ATM.
When Aspen entered our lives, it was through a woman that I meet on Facebook. She was an amazing person who quickly became a friend. Aspen landed in our lap as the beautiful gift he truly was. I believe that the best friendships happen when we least expect them. I find that to be true of people as well as the animals that enter our lives and live on our farm. Some of my most memorable relationships have occurred when animals (and people) have showed up on my doorstep like a dusty puzzle piece that I never knew had been missing.
When we got back to the chicken sale with cash in hand, the boy’s father had been waiting for our return. He wore a grim expression across his face, and he was rubbing his rough hands across his jeans. His lips were pursed, and his jaw was set tight. Either they weren’t selling, or the price was way off. My stomach churned as my hopes began plummeting.
“I hate to break it to you, but those geese cost more than twenty dollars.”
“I figured as much.” I responded with a shy but knowing smile.
“I’ll only sell the male and we’ll take no less than a hundred for him.”
The boy shook his head and mumbled an apology. “That’s way more than I thought they should be sold for.”
“Can I see the male?” I asked politely as his father left to retreat into the confines of his home.
When the boy pointed to the gander, he was a stunning grey and white beauty with a graceful neck but a messed-up wing. The wing wasn’t a dealbreaker, but the fact that he was a Toulouse was. Male Toulouse geese are known for being exceptionally aggressive during mating season and I refuse to keep aggressive animals on our farm. There was no way he would be taken from his girls without a fight.
Standing next to the Toulouse gander however was a goose that looked almost identical to our late Aspen. She was white with blue eyes and a hump on her bill. Something like a cross between an Embden and a white Chinese goose. Where Aspen had splatters of soft grey down, she had a more muted sandy brown. I believe they call the cross breed, a painted goose. When I saw her, I knew in my heart that we couldn’t leave without her. She was standing in a thick, soupy mess of a pen. Her feathers desperately in need of a bath but her eyes were soft and bright like the boy who raised her, and I knew that if I could talk the boy’s father into it… she would be ours.
“What about the white one? She’s a female, right?”
“Yes.” The boy sighed “She gets bullied all the time. Are you interested in her? I could probably convince my dad to let you buy her. I have talked about rehoming her several times before.“
“If your dad is okay with it… we’ll take her.”
One phone call later and my husband and I were switching positions in the car. I was driving us home to protect my broken fingers from further damage and he was sitting in the passenger seat… holding our painted goose. Other than the occasional honk and pooping on the door handle… she sat rather quietly. The boy had told us that she was a good girl who didn’t bite as he released her from his arms and into ours. Before we left, he stopped us one last time to plant a goodbye kiss along her slender neck. She had been well loved before, and she would be well loved forever more.
We tossed around names for hours. Some were funny, some silly, and some were positively ridiculous but none of them seemed to really fit her. As we were fixing up our big coop so that it could become her new home, it came to my attention that we should name her after a tree like we did with Aspen. As suggested by one of my best friends, we decided to call her Maple.
Nikolai, Caspian, and Aspen Rob my husband & the wonderful Maple 🍁
If you enjoy my blog, you may enjoy other things that I’ve written as well. Here is a list of some of my most popular posts. There’s no greater compliment than when people comment and share the things I have written with others, so thank you for taking time out of your day to spend it here with me. Happy Reading!
“Do you know what you need? You need a service dog.”
That was how my husband proposed the idea after I began battling with severe vertigo and had passed out a few times. I had seen several doctors but we still didn’t have an explanation for the new bizarre symptoms that were honestly ruining my life. That wasn’t even my only health issue. I also had been spiking chronic low-grade fevers. I had issues with a butterfly rash across my face, joint pain, exhaustion, a stomach disorder, a kidney disease, blood pressure problems that I had never dealt with before, and ocular migraines where I would suddenly lose my vision.
I couldn’t figure out how to handle everything or where to go next. My quality of life was greatly diminished and the issues with my body would easily wreck the kind of havoc that made every-day tasks nearly impossible… especially when things hit me at once. I could go a couple of weeks feeling amazing when out of left field I would be knocked on my behind for a month or two… or longer. I once lost my vision while I was in the middle of driving. I never saw the semi that was barreling down the highway towards my car. It happened so fast that Nikolai and I were almost taken out of this life for good. Something had to change. Anything! I was desperate.
Still… a service dog? Dogs like that are expensive right? Was I “sick enough” to have one? What did “sick enough” even mean? Was there a person behind the scenes who would qualify sick people for service dogs? What would people think of me for having to rely on a dog to make me a more functional person? The questions swirled around in my brain until it made me feel that much worse. I decided to do the only thing that make sense to me… I sat at a booth hunched over my keyboard inside our local coffee shop and I googled the heck out of it.
I learned that the only one who could approve my service dog request was my physician. I also came to the realization that people used service dogs to do all kinds of things, from helping with PTSD, to managing anxiety, and other health problems as well. Yet the biggest thing I discovered was that I was over qualified.
Incapable of preforming daily tasks due to a disability or illness?
Check.
Hospital visits that are frequent?
Check.
Official diagnoses on my medical records?
Check. Check. Check. Check. Check!
I read that owning and training your own dog with the help of a professional trainer was the fastest way to obtain such an animal. Otherwise, you might be sitting on a wait list for a couple of years or more. It takes a minimum of two years to train a service dog and you need to be committed to the endeavor or you both will fail. It’s one of the hardest (and most rewarding) things that you’ll ever do. Finding the right kind of dog would be a whole other mountain to hike. Temperament testing the dog’s personality for service dog traits and willingness to learn was just the beginning. Even that wouldn’t guarantee success. Dogs have a high rate of flunking out of service work.
Most people don’t have family who raise purebreds at their disposal. Most don’t have an army of people in their corner who have physically seen them suffer over the years either. I was blessed enough to have both. My grandparents had been raising Rough Coat Collies for well over fifty years. They came from a long line of calm, quiet, and gentle dogs. On top of that, my grandmother’s adopted daughter Isabell had worked for a neighbor who raised search and rescue German Shepherds, police dogs, and yes… even service dogs!
My mind was made up. I needed a service dog and with my doctor’s approval in hand… I knew exactly where to get one. I picked up my cellphone and called my grandmother. From that moment on, my life was forever changed by the most amazing dog my family and I have ever known. The events of her birth and that of her siblings are of such epic proportions that you almost had to be there to believe it.
“I’m not positive, but in my gut, I think that Bambi is pregnant!”
“How do you know Grandma?!”
“Well, I don’t know for sure… but I feel it.”
A week before easter my grandmother had felt that Bambi (Isabell’s German Shepherd) had been filling out her naturally lean frame. Bambi had connected multiple times with my grandfather’s dog Sampson, which was within itself rather miraculous. You see, Sampson was an old man for a purebred Collie. Even though my grandfather had passed away years earlier… Sampson (who was the last generations of purebred collies on my grandparent’s farm), was still very much alive.
We had wanted and loved these puppies before they were born. It was the end of an era for my grandparents but the beginning of an era for me because one of the babies was going to be my service dog. I spent many nights lying awake and praying for a pregnancy to take place. Begging God to provide the kind of dog who would help me become a more functional person for my family. It wasn’t a cure, but I needed to be more confident in my abilities to manage my household and health on my own while my husband was away for work.
The day before easter I was sprawled out in bed with my husband by my side and my 6-year-old son’s foot in my face. Nikolai had crawled into bed with us and spent the night kicking me in the head. It was a beautiful Saturday, there was a periwinkle hue over the mountain peaks and the fireball in the sky was just beginning to show off. It was going to be a lovely, relaxing weekend… until my phone rang.
“You’re aren’t going to believe this! You just aren’t going to believe it!” My grandmother’s voice was lively and animated.
I yawned, stretched my legs out before me and mumbled sleepily “What time is it? Why are you up so early?”
“SHE DID IT! WE HAVE PUPPIES!”
I flew to a fully awake sitting position among piles of blankets and maneuvered the limbs of my family away from me. “What do you mean? How?! Last week you weren’t even sure if she was pregnant and now, we have puppies? WE HAVE PUPPIES!”
I squealed and my body shook with excitement “I HAVE A SERVICE DOG IN TRAINING!!”
Had I stuck to the typical service dog rules… it may have made my life easier. Rules such as, “not choosing a puppy until you have them professionally evaluated first” are important to a higher success rate. My wonderful trainer lived in Georgia with me and these puppies were located in Arizona with my family. I decided to trust God and do my best to evaluate them myself through facetime. I don’t recommend doing what I did, but if I had done things any differently… than this would be a different story. Tallulah wasn’t the right dog but she was right for me.
Bambi had her babies in a field, choosing to hide them rather than be cozy and warm inside the house. My mom and my grandmother saw blood and found a hole that she dug to hide them in. The first two (and the oldest) puppies never made it into the foxhole. Their bodies were discovered lifeless several feet away. My mom ran her hands over them, rubbing the puppies with all her might. She breathed life into their mouths and gave them CPR to revive them.
One of the two puppies yelped and began rooting but struggled to latch or eat. The other laid limply underneath my mother’s hands. She called me with tears pouring down her face and I listened to her voice quiver as she whispered a prayer over the tiny animal’s body. Hours went by and she continued begging the fellow to live until his body became cold to the touch, stiff, and ridged. There were no more soft sounds from a beating heart. No shallow breaths being taken. He was gently set aside in the dumpster behind the house so that the other dogs couldn’t take him away before she had a chance to bury him. She devoted the rest of her time to encouraging the puppy who didn’t want to eat, to nurse.
Tallulah was found with one of her brothers in the hole her mom dug out of the earth to save them. The moment I saw her picture on my cellphone… I knew that she was mine. It was as if God took the extra time to write my name on her. She was the only puppy born with a large black letter “L” marking on her back… a characteristic trait that she eventually grew out of. Yet she had been written into existence especially for me. Her marking was a beacon of light within the whirlwind of darkness that my health had plunged me into once again.
After a long day, my exhausted mother had to dispose of the dirty towels and blankets from Bambi’s birthing room and move them into the dumpster. She had helped Bambi’s babies to nurse and even delivered a few more puppies along the way. The sky was fading from blue to silver and the stars were making a dashing appearance of their own. It was almost time to bury the body of the first born. The closer she got to the trash can the louder a scuffle from within became. Twelve or more hours had passed and there had been no sign of life or a will to live. Yet she lifted the lid and there he was! A living, breathing, wiggling miracle searching for his mother. That’s how “Lazarus” changed my mom’s life. A puppy that was completely dead came back to life with nothing more than faith and a prayer… the day before Easter.
My own prayed for puppy, has rescued my life countless times. She has warned me when it wasn’t safe for me to be driving. She has told me when my blood pressure became dangerously high. She helped chase an intruder out of my house and away from my son. She’s watched over my baby as if he were her own. I’ve seen her soothe Nikolai on sick days, and giggled to myself over the joy of her bubblegum pink tongue kissing away his sadness until laughter was all he had left. She has put herself between me and those she didn’t trust on multiple occasions and I’ve learned that she’s the best judge of character that I have ever meet.
There were moments within this amazing first year together when I thought that she wouldn’t make it as a service dog. We have been through trials that I never saw coming. Yet between my wonderful trainer’s advice (thank you Sharon!) and Tallulah’s desire to learn, my relationship with this incredible dog has only strengthened. She has saved me again and again. I owe her my life.
If you enjoyed this post about Tallulah, I have written other posts about her as well that you may want to check out! You can find those posts here, here, and here!
Nature hasn’t always been kind to me. There have been a number of instances where my love for animals has gotten me into trouble. Nothing reminded me of this more than the meme that came across my Facebook page a few weeks ago. The bold writing prompt stated to “Name an animal you’ve been chased by other than a dog.” The more I sat and thought about it… the more interesting my list became.
I decided to re-post the meme to Facebook along with the catalog of events that I had created without any further explanation. Several friends came across what I had written and had questions about how I got into such unusual circumstances to begin with. I had some of them laughing hysterically while others were horrified. I’m not entirely sure how to justify everything other than to say that I am and always will be, a lover of four legged and feathered creatures. I prefer their company over human beings and I just can’t seem to help myself.
A picnic basket slung over my arm, I laced up my salmon and slate colored tennis shoes to aid in the search for the perfect location. My family and I had been hiking through the mountains of North Georgia to find a lake that we had never seen before. The temperatures were sweltering into the upper eighties so it was imperative to find the perfect shady location to prevent my skin from turning the same shade of pink as a rosy maple moth. After a lip-smacking meal, we decided to discard our trash before heading out on our next adventure.
Within seconds of pushing the lid back to drop the contents inside, a squirrel launched itself at my horrified face. I barely had a moment to react but somehow dodged seconds before its outstretched claws grabbed at my gaping jaw. I screamed and ran but the tiny terror chased me around the parking lot. I used the car tire to lift myself up onto the hood of our vehicle yet the little jerk was persistent. My husband, who attempted to aid in my rescue (while uncontrollably cracking up) unfortunately became the next victim.
There we were, two grown adults being chased around our car by an animal who didn’t weigh more than a couple pounds. The evil little thing stole the uneaten crust that I dropped off of my son’s sandwich. He chirped angerly at us before finally racing back to the bin with his treasure and diving underneath the can’s swinging lid. That’s the last time I’ve ever tossed anything away without double checking for squirrels. I later came into contact with a woman who had been bitten and attacked by a squirrel herself, she was forced to get a series of rabies shots and even required surgery! Never underestimate the size of a creature or the damage they are capable of inflicting.
Before the sun had graced the day, my girlfriend and I tacked up our horses so we could enjoy a foggy trail ride through the woods. Moody mornings have always been among my most favorite kind of mornings. There was a clearing where the tall grass swayed in the breeze and tickled the bellies of our horses. It was the best spot to allow my chestnut mare to take her time so she could gather enough sweet grass in her mouth to turn her lips green. I was enjoying the gentle sway of my hips rocking to her gait when I noticed her swiveling ears and felt the flick of her tail. All at once I felt the warning of danger as her body tensed underneath me.
“Mia” who was normally quiet and steady, balked and danced a jig using her long slender legs. My eyes searched the wood line looking for the obvious such as a herd of deer, a bear, or a bobcat. Instead, my girlfriend pointed and gasped while holding her own mare steady from surging forward into the thicket. There under our feet were six bottle brush black tails with striking white stripes through them. We immediately stopped holding our girls back to allow their hooves to fly. I looked behind us as we galloped away only to realize that we were being chased by a family of skunks. They ran after our horses but thankfully our girls outraced them before they had a moment to spray us. I have no idea what it would take to get the smell of skunk off of a horse and I didn’t want to find out but it was a close call!
One of my most bizarre encounters occurred while taking a walk through a Florida subdivision. Out of my peripheral I saw the ground move below the towering pines and realized that I had stumbled upon a roll (also known as a herd) of armadillo. They typically don’t come out during the day and I had never seen one alive before. I had to bury one that our dog Moose killed on our farm. I remember being shocked to come across one on our little mountain… but this situation was something else entirely.
I got a little too curious and stuck around to watch them in order to understand what they were eating. Unfortunately, that’s when they noticed me as well. I’ll never again assume that armadillos are slow moving and social animals because once they realized I was there, they began to chase me. I had to run for my life past a row of houses and a gawking girl in pigtails that was sitting on her tricycle. I was convinced that if they caught up to me that I might contract leprosy. I never did figure out what they found so delicious but I left my dignity behind so I could escape with my health intact… and that was good enough for me.
It’s no secret that I loathe swimming (see last week’s post on this subject here). Since I was young, I’ve hated water activities of any kind and preferred to read a book pool side than join my peers. I’ll happily wade out into the water but once its lapping at my belly and I can no longer see my toes… I’ve had enough. Nikolai (my son) and Rob (my husband) talked me into going swimming at our favorite mountain top lake with them. I was having a wonderful time cooling off until I felt something bite me on the rump. Swirling about to save myself, I brushed it off as a fluke until it happened again. Then again! Only that last time… really hurt!
I screamed for my life and tried to run through water to get to shore but the stupid thing just kept biting me! I couldn’t figure out what it was and I couldn’t get traction. I shoved past a group of kids, stubbed my toe on a rock, tripped, and landed face first with an epic 10/10 worthy splash. Rob and Nikolai didn’t even try to hide their amusement and neither did the locals. When I finally made it close enough to shore to search my swimsuit bottoms, I felt humiliated to realize that the culprit which had bitten on my derriere was a small but apparently hungry fish. There wasn’t a soul on that beach that wasn’t laughing at my horror show and azalea-red cheeks.
Among all the birds in the bird world, Sparrows and Canadian Geese are my least favorite species. Sparrows are known for being territorial and Canadian geese… well they’re known for attacking people. My most traumatic memory as a four-year-old was when I attempted to feed bread to a Canadian goose only to have it come after me. It bit my finger, took some of the flesh off of it, and then beat me with its massive wings. Now having owned a farm as well as geese… I’m older, wiser, and far more prepared to handle them. Yet I’ve held a grudge ever since.
When Tallulah (my service dog in training) was around 11 weeks old, a territorial sparrow at a hotel gave both of us a lesson in PTSD. There we were, enjoying a walk together to stretch our legs outside our hotel room when a ninja in trees began to nail me repeatedly in the head. I never saw it coming! Poor Tallulah was caught off guard as well. One moment she was squatting to pee and the next, this insane bird was slamming into her nose pointy beak first. My brave half German shepherd girl yiped and attempted to hide behind me for cover.
This bird wasn’t giving up. As we ran from it, the bird flew from one tree to the next in pursuit of execution. Our only chance of escape was to run inside and allow the glass side-door to slam behind us. I will say that although the bird made Tallulah’s bathroom breaks a nightmare… we enjoyed watching the show from our hotel window as it attacked other unsuspecting victims. One woman clutching the hand of her lover had screamed and tossed her pool-side reading material at the bird. Another gentleman walking a Pitbull had to pick up his dog and run across the parking lot to his car when his dog became paralyzed with fear.
A horse, a donkey, a group of pigs, more than one rooster, an evil goat, a turkey, a snake, a swan, a bear, a feral cat, a racoon, a buffalo, and so many more have chased me. I have enough stories that I could probably fill the pages of a book. You would think that it would deter me but somehow, I only love them more which is probably why my neighbors know me as “the crazy animal lady.”
Is it just me or have you had some crazy experiences too?
Nikolai and Winnie (don’t worry I’m not a horrible parent, just a photographer)
Spring in North Georgia among the pines and wildflowers gives off a similar experience as autumn. You can smell floral notes on the breeze as colors of red, florescent green, pink, and purple paint the wood line and open themselves up to rolling hills. Ribbons of gold thread their way through spiral black-tops that wind up mountains and weave through farmland. It’s enough to have us rolling down our car windows or opening up every door in our little house… even when that means that we have to chase the ducks and chickens out.
The hummingbirds who dine on spring blooms have been bravely coming up to my house, sitting on my planter boxes and knocking on the windows. If I’m not quick enough with my early morning chores I have more than just my farm animals to lecture me for it. There’s a family of blue jays that like to steal left over cat food from my six barn cats. They sit on the electrical wire or sometimes on nearby tree limbs, they puff out their feathers and make sharp chirping sounds as if they are telling me off when I get behind.
There’s a squirrel who lives in a tree on our new property who has a habit of tormenting Tallulah. She’ll come down, flick her bushy tail, make noises to catch Tallulah’s attention and then bound right back up into her nest again. Tallulah will make chase and stand on her hind legs frantically barking in desperation of catching her until that funny little squirrel cackles with laughter. Tallulah will get frustrated and find a spot to sulk until that silly creature torments her all over again.
One of the best things about living out here is that even when we’re gone from home for a day or a few hours… we miss it deeply. I’ve never lived somewhere that despite the endless list of work that needs to be done, felt more like a vacation than an actual vacation does. Of course, that’s not to say that I won’t change my mind and feel desperate for a vacation after all the excitement of this next week. We’ve hired a digging company to remove and replace our culvert (the large pipe that allows our creek to flow underneath our driveway), as well as an electrical company who’s coming to re-wire and fix our well issues.
It’s been at least a couple of months since our well went out and we’ve had to run it off of a generator in order to have flowing water in the house again. We have also occasionally hooked up the rain water collection tank as well. My hair has never felt more amazing than on the days when I get hot rainwater showers, but I can’t wait to be able to turn on the faucet without having to take a walk down to the well house to do it. All of that aside, it’s officially gardening season and I’m behind. I had planned on starting seedlings but with all the construction I wasn’t sure where to put them… so I waited.
The most recent plan is the one I had been hoping for all along. We’re going to take down and remove Harlow’s original pasture and make a new pasture on our recently obtained property. We’ll be chopping down trees, stacking trunks to use as fencing material, and creating a much larger space for both our boys (Harlow & Caspian). I’m certain I’ll get to experience exactly how my mom and my grandparents felt when they we’re doing similar things for the forestry service like I wrote about last week!
The old pasture will become our new gardening oasis. Harlow and Caspian’s composted manure will be good food for fragile seedlings. We’ll clean our bunny coop out and add that manure to our garden as well as the adding all of the left-over scraps of hay from the horse trailer where we store our bales. I even have several piles of compost from Harlow and Caspian’s stalls that I’ve been churning, as well as compost piles inside of our chicken coop!
Having the entire pasture to use as a garden this year will greatly improve how much we are able to harvest. This autumn we’ll dismantle the ugly cement blocks that protect our well house and replace them with a greenhouse so that we can continue planting and growing things throughout the winter. Since the well has access to power, we’ll be able to run a heater that will keep the pipes and pump from freezing over while keeping our plants warm from bitter wind and frost. This will essentially fix several problems all at once.
As I said in “The Leap” buying the land to add to our property was only the beginning. The work that comes after is what shapes it into what it can become and how it can provide for us. It’s a wonder that the love we put into the soil, we get back ten folds. The work load is overwhelming to be sure… but it’s also invigorating! Our peach and apples trees are dappled with blooms. It won’t be long until I’m filling baskets to the brim with fruit and hauling fresh cut flowers into the house.
Nikolai playing with bugs 🐞 Since I rarely post selfies… hey there! It’s me!
Other than being a pretty face, Aspen arrived on our farm without a true purpose and with very little expectations from me. I had heard that geese made wonderful guardians for chickens and livestock, but I really only picked him out because I thought he would look lovely swimming around in our creek. He was a sight to behold for sure but in a very short amount of time his real worth came in teaching my family that the best friendships happen organically and when you least expect them.
Noelle and Bells we’re Aspen’s mates and even though he loved his girls, to our delight he still made time for us. He would spend the early morning hours preening his stunning white and silver down and then take his daily walk to the creek with a dame (female goose) on either side. Shockingly Aspen set aside the late afternoon warmth in order to sunbathe right next to our front door by himself. He would peak into our little house and watch our every move. If he caught someone walking by in the living room he would tap-tap-tap on the glass and horrify them with what sounded like a bike horn inside of a megaphone.
“HONK!!!”
If he was ignored further, he would waddle down a step or two so he could peak into the other window and tap on the glass over there. He would make as much racket as possible in order to get the human contact that he felt he justly deserved. Back and forth this crazy bird would go from one window to the next even long after we had tossed him kitchen scraps in an attempt to silence him. His nemesis the broom would shoo him down the stairs to prevent Aspen’s poop from sticking to our welcome mat but even that wasn’t a strong enough deterrent to keep him away for very long.
In the middle of a weekday Noelle went missing and Bells became Aspen’s leading lady. Several months went by before Bells went missing as well. Predators are an unfortunate hazard of farm life and in the summer, we become surrounded by hungry mating coyotes. Aspen kept to his routine without his girls but his love affair with people (most particularly my husband) grew stronger than ever. As Rob (my husband) would leave for work, Aspen would fly the entire length of our driveway and chase his car all the way down the dirt road just to catch up to him. This crazy goose would then hitch a ride home in the car so that my husband could drop him back off before attempting to leave for work all over again.
I was sitting on my bed distracted from having deep conversations with my grandmother over the phone when a deafening “HONK! HONK! HONK!” overpowered my ability to speak or listen to anything that was being said to me.
There in my bedroom stood our insane goose. His big blue eyes swirling suspiciously to get a better look at my face from his position on the floor and his feathers puffed out for full effect. Apparently, Rob had been bringing in groceries and left the storm door open just enough for Aspen to slide his beak into so he could finally make his way inside the house. He had been trying to follow the dogs inside for ages but this time he finally made it! There he was filling my bedroom with his megaphone voice box when my husband and our son Nikolai sprinted to my rescue in order to aid in chasing him back out again.
This bird somehow dodged three people only to escape by waddling between Nikolai’s open legs. He pitter-pattered as quick as his flippers could take him into the living room where he helped himself up onto the sofa. When he thought he was cornered he spread open his stunning wingspan to fly around the kitchen counter before landing with a wicked “THUMP!” back onto the living-room floor. It took some football style tackling but my husband was successful at scaring him out of the house again. Rob then caught the big guy outside and brought him back in to make a round of apologies.
He once had a week-long vacation spent at one of my best friend’s house. While farm sitting for me, he made it a point to climb up into Heather’s truck and out-right refused to get back out again. Luckily for Aspen, Heather spoils my farm more than I do. She came to the conclusion that my poor goose was lonely so she hauled his kiddy pool all the way to her house. She created a pen of his own where she fed him all the kale he had ever dreamed of… until Aspen fell in love with Jimmy (Heather’s husband).
Poor Heather got caught up in a love triangle between Aspen and her beloved Jimmy. Aspen loved Jimmy so much that he would bite at Heather if she tried to get between him and the whirlwind love of his life. Aspen would fly to Jimmy so he could sit on Jimmy’s foot, where he would love bite the heck out of Jimmy’s knee caps before making sweet love to him by humping his foot. I have never laughed so hard or snorted so loudly as the night I got that phone call from the hysterical and gasping for air version of my friend Heather.
We had joyful tears poring down our cheeks as Jimmy exclaimed in the background… “It’s not funny!!! He tried to mate with me!”
Aspen also tried to mate with Rob as well. As Rob was sitting outside working on our broken-down dodge in the driveway, Aspen would get upset over any lack of interest in him by the men within his vicinity. He would steal Rob’s tools and haul them off into the woods. I would watch the two of them as they interacted with one another from the window while clutching my heaving sides. Rob would yell and chase down this massive goose while carefully searching the bramble for his missing equipment. However, the longer Rob went on ignoring him the angrier Aspen got until… he would love-bite Rob in the knee cap and start dry humping Rob’s leg and foot. Whenever Rob wasn’t home, our poor farrier became Aspen’s next love interest whenever he popped by to trim the hooves on the equine.
Until Aspen we had no idea that Geese would hump the objects of their obsession. We also had no clue that they might get so attached to one person that they make the decision to mate with them for the rest of their lives. We bought some baby ducklings who liked to follow behind Rob and I. Aspen took to them as if they were the fruit of his love for my husband. He looked after them, took walks to the creek with them, and scolded Rob for neglecting them.
We had a family movie night one summer evening and while being emotionally invested into the plot, Aspen snuck in to join us on the sofa. When I got up to grab a second helping of popcorn… I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. That crazy goose had his eyes glued to the screen and watched the movie as if he understood everything that was being said. He even reached over to steal some popcorn that Nikolai had dropped between the cushions.
I think my most favorite memory was when a car pulled into my driveway to deliver a package. A man stepped out of the passenger seat carrying a box that they thought was mine but he only got halfway to my front door before spotting Aspen. That bird spread his wings open and screamed a battle cry that I could hear from within my house. The poor unsuspecting man’s face changed to several shades of white. He threw the box at Aspen and made a run for the car door. His foot lost grip and slipped in the mud underneath his boot as he scrambled to reach the door handle. Aspen had already surpassed the runway for flight and landed directly on top of this poor soul. He was bashing his wings against this man’s head while biting the guy who was now screaming for his life. To this day that car made the fastest three point turn that I’ve ever seen.
We loved Aspen so much that we created a dating profile on Facebook to help him find the perfect mate. It got thousands of views and spread joy to everyone who got to know him through social media. We also tried to keep Aspen safe by penning him up at night in our big coop with all the chickens. Yet he made his opinion on the matter VERY clear to us when in retaliation and anger he would grab the chickens by the back of the head and launch them through the air behind him. Like a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum at the expense of the poor chickens. He would thrash his wings against the wire pen, and stomp around throwing chickens in his wake.
We came to the understanding that his happiness revolved around his ability to go where he pleased… even if that meant I was scrubbing goose poop off my front porch every single day. His zest for life was more important than our desires to keep him as safe as possible even if at some point we would have to live without him. Besides that we were sure that even the neighbors could hear him scream/honking in anger over his confinement. The quality of a life is far better than the quantity of days in which that life is on this earth. We knew that his days were numbered and yet we had our dogs on patrol to keep him around for as long as we could.
Even still, when that day finally came it hurt our family deeper than we could have ever anticipated. We missed the sound of Aspen’s voice echoing through the mountains. We searched the woods for a body to bury but we never found one. Whenever we went hiking around the farm and looked behind us to where he normally would be… the only thing left was emptiness. Aspen became a beacon of light within our lives, an endless supply of humor, but most of all… he became our friend.
Aspen watching Nikolai play, taken with my “good camera” Aspen, Noelle, and BellsIf we took a walk… he had to come too!Sneaky boy!My husband with Aspen enjoying a bonfireWatching over his ducklingsOne of the MANY times we had to escort him back home 🙄 😅
We risked everything when we first bought our little farm. We sold whatever we could for 4.71 acres of mountain land that we bought from a meth addict. 3.71 acres of which was sight unseen. It was among the most crazy endeavors that we had ever tackled in our lives and I’m not the risk taking type. I’m the think-everything-through-from-all-angles type of woman. The ask-100-questions-before-you-ride-or-die sort of girl, while my husband is my polar opposite.
We couldn’t afford much but we had this little dream tucked away in our hearts of owning our own property and finding financial freedom. Throughout the years, my husband and I talked about our love of country living and our desire to be engulphed by mountains. Early on in our marriage we bought a house near an Army base in Tennessee. It was a stunning old farmhouse in suburbia with original hard wood floors on .25 acres of land. We loved that house. We wanted to raise our babies in that house. Unfortunately the year after purchasing was when the housing market came to a crashing halt. We paid far more for it than what it ended up being worth.
We tried to hold onto to our love of that old house for dear life. Meanwhile, my husband barely made it through five different layoffs at work. He needed a position with better healthcare and stronger job security. We tried to sell the house to get out from underneath it. We tried to rent it out, and we tried paying for two mortgages. In the end we were left living pay check to pay check and struggling to keep the piles of bills at bay. We spent many nights fighting between our fears of losing everything and our need for sleep. When we finally filed for bankruptcy and foreclosure, my husband took it as a deeply personal failure on his part, while I felt relieved of our biggest burden.
We moved around quite a bit with my husband’s new position in life-flight until we ended up in a little mountain town called Ellijay. It was one step closer to everything we had ever wanted and we had the privilege of renting a house with some amazing views. The “No pets allowed” policy however was a stab in my animal loving heart. I longed for something that was ours. My husband was convinced after our foreclosure that we wouldn’t be able to buy anything of our own for a very long time. Yet there it was… that little dream tugging on the strings of my heart. So I started browsing Facebook Marketplace for land. Who would have thought that a seller might be satisfied with owner financing something just to have money in their pockets and not have to pay the taxes on a property they don’t use anymore?
There were so many listings that found their way onto my feed. Most of them were far above our price range, some were in gated communities, and others were land parcels that were lacking in natural resources. I kept looking until I spotted an advertisement that read something like “Nearly five secluded acres in Georgia off of a private dirt road. Needs work, asking 28K. Has a well and a septic tank.” I gasped. There was no way it could be possible, but I wasn’t about to walk away without being sure. I knew that if it was true… it was more than likely going to get snatched up by someone who probably had enough cash in their pockets to throw at it than we did. Yet I wouldn’t forgive myself if we didn’t at least have a look.
My husband thought I was crazy at first. He was right, I was. Yet I knew that there had to be a better way to live rather than struggling from pay check to paycheck. I was done with worrying late into the night and watching my husband fight to keep a roof over our heads. I was tired of throwing rent money away while never seeing the end of the rat race. So I begged him to think about it, and then I drove to the property with Nikolai so we could have a look. The bumpy dirt road was a muddy disaster. My car nearly got stuck and the first driveway I came to made my heart sink because it was steep… but I kept going anyway.
When I finally found our destination, the property was a mess. The only building on it had burnt down and needed to be removed. The drug addicted mother to the man who was selling the parcel had left trash everywhere and hoarded old tires. Yet if you looked past what needed elbow work… stunning large pines loomed overhead. The smell of forest and earth lingered in the air, the creek babbled over rocks, and you couldn’t see a single neighbor because you were surrounded by nature everywhere you looked. It was dripping with potential in my eyes.
I talked the seller down in price due to the cleanup involved and the taxes they owed on it. We walked away having paid 21K, interest free for almost five acres of land. It was one of the most challenging things we had ever done because once we bought it, that’s when the real work began. We downsized our belongings, threw everything else into a storage unit and lived in hotels for 6 months. Nikolai wasn’t in school yet. Rob traveled for work anyway and his company paid to put him up in hotels, so we traveled with him. In between my husband’s work, we would drop by the farm to clean it up. Little by little we took it from where it was and polished it into what we knew it could become.
We didn’t have time to build a house. We didn’t have the funds to build one either. Instead we bought a brand new two bedroom, one bathroom single wide mobile home. 782 sq. feet, just a little bit bigger than the largest tiny house. I didn’t think I would be the kind of woman who would fall in love with what most people call a trailer. It wasn’t my dream option as a little girl or as an adult. That all changed once I started pouring my heart and soul into it. Between my love of decorating and our stunning $300.00 a month mortgage payment… I lost all desire for having a big house with fat monthly bills no matter how pretty the house might be. Peace of mind was worth it’s weight in gold.
We had everything we needed and so much more. We paid off our land, both of our cars, and brought home some pretty amazing fuzzy faces to add to our little family. I learned how to compost and began creating the garden of my dreams. We spent evenings catching fire flies with our son and cutting walking paths into the woodlands. When we finally got around to seeing the rest of our property, we discovered incredible mountain views and explored the little creek that runs through the entire front end of our property. With hard work, dedication, and a shoe string budget, we created the kind of life that we had always dreamed of.
In the beginning stages of filing paperwork to close on our property and feeling the pressure to get the clean up sorted as quickly as possible, we had moments of doubt. Living out of a suitcase with a three year old made me want to loose my mind. It was challenging, frustrating, and at times we thought that perhaps we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. Yet, we stuck it out and we found that sweat equity more than doubled the value of what we had originally put into it. On the other hand, the memories we made while we were working together and the lessons that our hard work taught our son was priceless.
Four years into living the life we had always dreamed of and another unexpected opportunity ended up coming our way. The property directly across from our driveway went up for sale. 6.49 acres listed below fair market value and it was sitting directly within view out my bedroom and living room window. We talked to the land owner and created a plan to start saving. In December we applied for a bank loan to purchase the property but a week later we received a call from the loan manager who told us that we had been denied. Our bankruptcy and foreclosure date disqualified us from meeting the bank’s requirements by only one month. We waited 6 weeks, held our breath, and we applied again.
Those six weeks crept by at a snail’s pace but we kept in contact with the seller and saved money like crazy. Many weeks that rob could have spent with us at home were used up as he put in extra hours at work. When the day finally arrived to reapply, Rob sent in the paperwork and then we waited… again. Four days later we got a call from the bank telling us that our loan had officially been approved. The two weeks after that moment were a blur of filling out and faxing information over to our lawyer as we inched our way towards receiving a closing date. In the meantime, we went through one crisis after the next from December to March.
My nerves were raw, stress levels high, and my hopes needed to come back down to earth before I hurt myself. Still, I looked around at all we had built together over the whirlwind of this adventure and I was overflowing with wonderment and gratitude. We had been gifted the ability to more than double the size of the lot that we already had without having to move anywhere to do it. This is the moment that we had been blessed with. That crazy dream that we held in our hearts until we took one leap of faith after the next is what brought us to the point of owning 11.20 stunning acres.
I created this blog and website with the hope that our farm might grow and that we might be able to rebrand it. I decided to keep the website and the dream even after our first refusal from the bank. Sometimes that leap of faith turns out better than those carefully choreographed plans that we make. Sometimes doing what feels safe is actually the very thing that’s holding you back from living the life you’ve always wanted. No matter how things worked themselves out, I knew that we were exactly where we were meant to be.
Today we signed the closing documents with the bank and the seller of the property. Once again we find ourselves at the beginning of all the hard work that is to follow. It’s a beautiful place to be. Our goal of having a greenhouse, turning Harlow’s current pasture into rows of cut flowers and garden beds while eventually obtaining cows… is now a reachable one! Happy birthday to Everpine Forest and Farm.
Our new property! Isn’t it stunning?!My favorite kid! The view on our 4.71 acresBaby Tallulah in front of our girl Moose!Took this image long before we bought the new property. Everything to the right of Nikolai all the way up the hill is ours now.Our new farm logoWelcome to our home ❤️ This is the living room where I often type up my blog postsMy favorite view and now all that land across the street is ours as well Our horse Harlow that I write about often
I grew up learning how to fly fish. I’d spend the afternoon wading into a bubbling stream, a fishing pole in one hand, and a tacklebox in the other. The sounds of birds cheerfully overhead with their sing-song voices echoing through the forest. The wisp of my fishing line zipping through the air as I made my cast and the feel of it slipping through my fingers as I gently pulled my fly back in again. It was one of my most favorite childhood memories.
There’s something both humbling and healing about nature, it has a way of reaching into the soul to soothe the ache for places untouched by the horrors of humanity. It didn’t matter if I caught a fish that day or not. No classroom lecture was more valuable than the lessons nature was able to teach me. Dragging my kayak into a muddy river, stretching my legs across the bow and dipping my feet into the water below to allow tiny fish to nibble on my toes… it was exactly where I belonged.
If I’m being honest, it’s where we all belong. Not fighting against nature by being cooped up in town houses or living in suburbia. Not surrounded by people who measure the length of their grass rather than letting it grow so that birds and foxes can nest. The ridiculousness of HOA squabbles set aside along with petty neighborhood arguments over things that are truly meaningless to the bigger picture. Spending our lives being afraid over how we’re going to come up with the funds to pay large mortgages in an effort to keep a roof over the heads of our children. Worse yet, trying to figure out how to put food on the table when the cost of produce continually rises. Instead, we should choose to allow the dirt we walk on and the labor of our hands to do the providing while sharing that nourishment with others. Prioritizing our needs over the love of things.
When I had my son, it was vitally important to me that he have the opportunity to grow up with this kind of freedom. Not just to visit it or only be allowed to taste what a life like this could offer only once in a while… but to own it every single day. To learn about different animals, share our home with nature, and watch my boy discover the beauty of growing our own food. To teach him the responsibility of nurturing the world around us while maintaining empathy for the only planet we have to live on. To teach him that in buying less, we actually have so much more.
When the pandemic hit, many people discovered the value in this way of life than ever before. My city living friends were flocking to buy homesteads. I witnessed more people put down their cell phones than ever before. Adults helped their neighbors cope, parents began taking charge of their children’s education, and best of all… people were actually interacting with nature. News sources were put on mute and choices were made to take back what’s always been the most valuable thing of all… our freedom.
Animals walked among skyscrapers, whales were able to move closer to the shoreline to feed rather than starve. Smog cleared and the earth began the process of healing. No one had ever seen such incredible phenomenon’s… right up until we reverted back to old habits. That’s when the healing began to rot again. Nothing changed for our little farm though. We continued to wake up surrounded by woodland nature. We fed our animals, tended to our garden, and best of all… we spent summer days teaching our son how to fish. We hiked our way up mountain tops to explore, left nothing but footprints behind, and continued working towards living below our means.
In South Korea my husband and I saw apartment homes full of community gardens. Everywhere you looked, people found a way to plant beautiful things in the ugliest of places and they did their best to help one another. This lifestyle isn’t the only way to live, but it’s one of the better options available. The cost of borrowing large sums of money to live above your means will take a toll on your health. Taking walks while breathing in toxic fumes will cut years off of your life. Raising children in an environment that’s lacking humanity can teach them to become immune to the inhumane.
So how do we fix it? When the next pandemic or natural disaster happens and it’s too late to teach such valuable survival skills… where will we be then? The world as we know it is changing everyday. Human nature is adding toxins into our food sources and dumping trash into the earth. Never before have we seen so many life altering illnesses and mental health distress. So… where do we go from here? My family packed up everything we owned to create a new way of living. How about you? Where do you see yourself? What do you think you can do to help?
Nikolai fishing with daddyCellphone shot of one of my favorite places
Before my son was born, when he was just a tiny squiggle within my belly and his gender was unknown… we decided to temporarily name him Blueberry. Due to severe weight loss and illness, my pregnancy was labeled as high risk and I had an overwhelming fear that my baby wouldn’t live long enough to be properly introduced to us. With the exception of a small group of close friends and family members, we kept Blueberry’s existence a secret from the rest of the world. Yet, we would exchanged knowing glances when discussing our love of… blueberries.
When we discovered that our tiny Blue was indeed a boy… it felt like God himself was smiling while walking us through the challenging process of being a high risk pregnancy. I spent nausea filled days writing letters and addressing them to “Little Blue” as keepsakes for him to read when he was grown. As a toddler my son got into several large containers of blueberries that I kept in the refrigerator on the lowest shelf and ate so many of them that it turned his poop black. He somehow managed to hide the containers from us but the black poop sent us running in a panic to visit the nearest pediatrician to check for blood. Several hundred dollars and a stool sample later… those containers of blueberries were the most expensive berries (besides our son) that we had ever paid for.
Early one morning a couple years later, I woke to what looked like a blue Smurf peaking up at me over the edge of my bed. With a blue face and lilac hands, my bright eyed boy was a giggling disaster. He had gotten up in the middle of the night, pulled a chair over to the refrigerator so he could reach into the freezer and over indulged on the bag of frozen blueberries I had saved for breakfast. He ate so many that his face, arms, belly, and legs were covered. It took days to wash out all the purple dye that stained his skin. The kid looked like he had been pulled straight out of a Pixar movie.
To this day he loves the fruit so much that we planted several blueberry bushes on our farm specifically for him. Even then, he begs us to still make time to hit up the you-pick’s in the summer. We bring home blueberries by the bucket full and I’m left sorting out how to use them all up in recipes. I pay extra money in the winter to buy fresh off-season blueberries from local farms. Yet I end up buying even more at the grocery store because he gobbles them down before I can pop them into his breakfast box for school. I’ve even seen him put farm chores on hold, stopping dead in his tracks to eat handfuls of unripe blueberries because he just couldn’t wait a moment longer!
Being a mother to this amazing little boy is forever an adventure. I’ve never laughed so hard, worried so much, or loved blueberries more in my entire life. He will risk walking through thorns and bramble while allowing me to pull out the stickers caught under his skin… just so he can get a mouthful of their juicy goodness. When asked to choose between a piece of candy or those delicious violet colored fruit… he goes for blueberries every single time. If I had only known just how much his nickname meant!
My silly boy as a toddler Caught washing handfuls of them so I grabbed my camera to help me never forget Nikolai eating buckets of blueberries at the you-pick.
In third grade my mama and I would sit at the kitchen table and watch all the wild birds go about their day. They often had such unique personalities. If you weren’t paying attention… you would miss experiencing the joy and laughter that they had to offer. One day I came home from school to find a bird book resting on our kitchen table with a pair of binoculars. For several years the book was only removed from the table when we needed space to eat and afterwards, was carefully put back again.
Some afternoons I’d spend hours flipping through the pages of that book while reading about my favorite species of finches. To this day I still have a love affair with owl finches, spice finches, and even the European gold finches that are located throughout parts of Europe. My thirst to learn about birds followed me well into adulthood and was passed down to my son. It was on our little farm that I discovered one of the most unique types of birds I had ever come across. Ten years ago throughout many neighborhoods you could hear the sounds of nightjars at dusk. With countless pesticides being sprayed to reduce the bug population, the number of nightjars has decreased by staggering amounts.
These amazing birds are nearing extinction now to the point where people rarely hear them at all. Their main food source and hunting ground is wooded areas with large open fields. These ground dwelling creatures make nests out of forest leaves and are extremely hard to spot due to their ability to blend into their environment. They look something like a cross between an owl and a frog. They have small heads, round bodies, and very large mouths. They swoop across pastures with their mouths open wide like a butterfly net to capture moths and other flying insects for nourishment.
When we first moved to our little farm we set up a firepit with Nikolai (our son). It allowed us to roast marshmallows and eat charred vegetarian hot dogs smothered in delicious condiments. With the fire blazing and our bellies full, we listened to the sounds of nature all around us. Big bull frogs singing from our creek, tiny tree frogs belting out sounds that should have come from something far larger, and little crickets dancing among the tall grass. There was one sound that we just couldn’t place though.
I took a recording and uploaded the sound to Facebook so we could find someone who possibly knew more. Responses flooded my feed but I was able to rule out most of them. One friend of mine suggested that it sounded like a whippoorwill. I searched for videos on YouTube and compared them to what I heard. It was close but it still didn’t fit the mark. It took some more digging but I finally came across the exact sound that I was looking for. A close cousin to the whippoorwill is an amazing creature called the Chuck Will’s Widow.
The bird’s cry sounds exactly like it’s name suggests. It first makes a chucking sound in it’s throat, then a noise that sounds something like “Will’s-Widow!” It’s incredibly unique and I was positively giddy over my discovery. Now every spring when the weather gets warm… we sit outside together as a family and listen for this special voice that lives on our mountain and hunts in the pastures of our farm.
Our first night after having bought Harlow (our paint horse), I was driving home from Atlanta with Nikolai while marveling over the dusty pink hues that sun made across the sky as it set. Our hands hung out of the open car windows to enjoy the coolness of the evening air on our skin while our vehicle finally skipped down our dirt road bumping it’s way over potholes. Suddenly, a flurry of wings caught my eye and forced me to mash my breaks to the floorboard of my car. I thought I had nearly hit a bat but instead two eyes glistened in the glow of my headlights.
I watched his head swivel and my eyes locked with his. In the span of just a few seconds he lifted from the ground making the most lovely shape with his wings as he flew up and over our car. All Nikolai and I could do was gasp. We knew exactly who he was from the countless hours we spent researching information and browsing photos of what he might look like. We had hoped that we might see him one day but knew since he was so hard to spot, that it may never happen. We happily settled on enjoying the stunning song that he preformed every night instead. Actually having the opportunity to see him however, was a magical moment indeed.
In the years that we lived on our farm, we only heard one Chuck Will’s Widow crying out of the curtain of darkness. However, several weeks after that amazing encounter, we heard not one… but TWO Widows! Clear as day! Singing in unison, two beautiful voices were enjoying the night together. The lone voice coming from our little friend was lonely no longer. We prayerfully made requests that they might make babies together so we could enjoy the fruits of their love for years to come. This spring we hold our breath as we listen for their triumphant return home.
Everpine & Petal 