Tiny Flower Farm Dream

 

Many summers ago I enjoyed visiting the homes of people who lived along the northern Atlantic seaside. Their homes included a converted barn on a stretch of green meadow thriving on salty air, a house with simple wooden beams whose hillside location allowed for a grand, uninterrupted view of the Atlantic Ocean, and an artist’s studio docked at the edge of a harbor next to a fishing boat. We spent one day with a woman who collected data on the migration of birds, taking a ferry together to an island where we counted endangered birds. I don’t remember much about her home but I do remember the warmth of her small wooden dining room table and a colorful cloth she laid across it for dinner. She sent us out into her meadow with scissors and told us to cut and arrange the flowers for the evening. Her seaside wildflowers in early August were stunning and we collected a variety in the mason jar she provided. 

I wish I could remember so much more but it was the feeling of the evening, among the warmth of her small home with the bursting jar of flowers that I cherish so deeply in my bones. So when we bought a home of our own, I planted flowers for cutting. And when we had children old enough to use scissors, I sent them out into the garden with a jar. This Monday morning we are trying to establish our homeschool rhythm and I’ve been trying to stay prompt, starting at 9:00. But the cicadas are making their fabulous noises and the sun is out but it is cool and most September-ish. So I send them out to the garden with scissors instead of pulling out the workbooks. My daughter comes in with her jar and an unexpected arrangement of flowers. I thought she’d pick from the abundant dahlias and zinnias but instead has chosen some of the white-flowering weeds, sedum, peach-colored berries (are those even from my yard?), and dusty miller. “It represents all the seasons!” Isn’t that just the best way to appreciate beauty? To see what another beholds, be surprised and curious, and then center it on the dining room table for the rest of the day to wonder at another's perception of the world.  

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* Picture: Flowers from my yard

**Fun resource dive: Blossom and Branch Micro Farming Videos

Do people even read Blogs anymore?

I stopped writing regularly ten years ago when a baby girl with a century-old soul entered my life. I had no brain space to recall the plot of the book I had been working on before she arrived. I also had no words for the bursting love I felt toward this squishy smoosh who loved to question the natural world like a tiny philosopher. I had to answer important questions about where our spirits live before we are born. "Are we all in a pile somewhere?" We had to incorporate an imaginary dog named "Ketchup" into our dinner routine if eating it was going to be successful. We got to teach this little brain to read so she could research her own answers since she found Ben and my answers inadequate and sometimes unanswered. "Do they put little pieces of the moon into flashlights so that they glow?" Like most parents, we lived in the juxtaposition of being utterly in love and exhausted. 

There were a few months when my daughter was a toddler that I tried to reclaim the joy of writing stories again. A few friends and I started a writing group where we discussed plot twists, character development, and strategies to fit more writing into our lives. Bailey wrote the most clever and comical observation about the cult-following of Wildbird baby carrier.  Meanwhile, our gang of two-year-old daughters donned babushkas and strands of plastic pearls, pushing pink plastic shopping carts around the dining room table. During this time I did write some prose on co-sleeping, observations on counting with a toddler (and the insistence that four did not exist), and other topics that a tiny niche of people would maybe find interesting at a very specific time. But isn’t that the beauty of personal narrative and writing simply because you love to write? These are the writings I hold most dear to my heart. These were the type of writings that I sought out at night while nursing my second baby in the glow of my phone screen when I felt so tired, so over-touched, and like I was the only person awake in the city. Words of other mothers were a tiny emotional lifeline in the stillness of two a.m.

It was a year before I became pregnant with the second squishy baby when I started acrylic painting thanks to Amanda Evanston. Amanda lived in my Sesame Street neighborhood (a magical place at that time of my life) and every day, twice a day, I parked my car in front of Amanda’s home so I could drop off and pick up my daughter from childcare. One summer Amanda covered her garage in the most vibrant paintings of wildflowers.  I became obsessed with the process of painting flowers and landscapes using "chaos layers". This was the creative outlet that kept me connected to hope when I spent nine months with pre-partum depression. Painting was a gooey and spectacular outlet that required just enough headspace that I could muster. I am eternally grateful for Amanda’s instruction, encouragement, and beauty during this time of my life. I am so thankful we became friends in the process. 

But words. Words are what I fall back on for memories. Encouragement. Understanding. Knowledge. Reflection. Beauty. Stories. Stories are groupings of meaningful words that help us connect. Stories are the reason we can grow in empathy. Share in an otherwise unfamiliar perspective. Find the bittersweet beauty, heartache, injustice, pain, tenderness, redemption, hope, and just general human-ness that either levels us to the ground or grows us. Stories are what I look for in myself, a situation, others, and in healing. Stories reveal how big, glorious, and faithful God is and stories can help us do better/ do best when really hard things happen. 

I do not believe this world needs the noise of more words in 2023. Truth: no one needs to hear my voice or musings. There is nothing special here. But then I think of the morning I found out I was pregnant. It was a little unexpected and I felt stunned. I remember instinctively falling back on what was routine and comforting. I turned on my favorite radio station and then poured through the words of a blog, Hulaseventy, that I had followed since undergraduate college. I found immense comfort and even excitement while reading this amazing artist-mom's stories about herself in the context of her family. Her words were an unknown lifeline that she had thrown out into the world years before but there I was in 2013 eating them up like a comfort food.

So why bother to write when the world could probably use more silence and stillness? A friend from many years ago encouraged me to keep writing so that my daughter could see me prioritizing a passion. I also write to preserve little landscapes of my life and the people I am so fortunate to spend time with. Going back to the previous blog posts I strung together between 2001-2013 can be super cringey but it is also so sweet. It is there that I can live delicious moments twice: recorded conversations that make me giggle or think deeply, observations of my niece and nephew when they were small (and are now in their twenties!), or the rewarding nature of my job detailed in a story form. It can also reveal the reality of a spectrum of emotions, mistakes, or things unseen at the time but obvious now.  So.... Who wants to read the stories of a not-super-exciting and introverted mind? Who reads blogs anymore? If no one else, I do.

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*Photo: Amanda Evanston's garage has been the backdrop of our Halloween pictures since 2017

** Fun resource Dive: The Secret Garden painting class. Worth every penny.