Thank you, dear friend, for planting your garden so beautifully. You didn’t see, but as I stood there studying your little pocket of the world, a gap in reality opened, and an old dream came through and seized me. I nearly burst into tears.
Life has this way of unfolding itself. When you’re a child, the future is open to you, the possibilities endless. You don’t realize how just one choice can set off a series of other choices that lead you somewhere you didn’t expect to find yourself.
I am deeply grateful for this life, for my family, for our home. I love my little pocket of the world, which includes a lovely garden. But there’s a place in my heart that can’t quite be satisfied by anything but a farm. A real, dirty, stinking, beautiful farm.
It must have begun with Grandpa and Grandma’s farm in northern Alberta. My favorite place in the world. An opening in the forest, a haven holding a yellow house, a red barn, a garden and pasture and creek. So many memories with cousins and puppies and bales. I can still smell that place. I can walk through it all, remembering what it felt like to be there, every nook and cranny. My heart was home on the farm. But I can never go back to the place of my memories; it’s not what it once was. I wonder if this ache in my chest is the ongoing search for home, and part of the ache is knowing I’ll never know its fullness until my true Home. Well, I guess I know the answer by now.
You probably weren’t thinking about me, dear friend, when you planted your peas and corn, or built your wood fences, or put up chicken wire to house your colorful brood, but know that while your farm is feeding your family, the morning that you shared it with me, it fed my soul too.