Alongside Her

Sometimes I wonder who is healing the other....

The rows of the garden now are lush and overflowing. The separation between plants is hard to distinguish now compared to even a few weeks ago. The only way to tell where the spikey leaves of the borage end and the tomatoes begin is by the plants' shape and textures. They grow wildly together as if they never wanted to live separately, only together as one beautiful array of life. The air is full of the floral scent of blooming tulsi basil and the final blooming of Milkweed, and it is intoxicating as it brushes the sides of my bare tanned legs. Everywhere I look, the calendula blooms that I never planted but emerge from seeds that found their way into the rich soil and returned on their own. Many plants have now found ways to make their home on this hill, and I rarely have to welcome them back year after year. Every blooming flower buzzes with bees, and the clover blankets the ground beneath my feet. I have watched rabbits curl into the clover these days and enjoy the snacks in the fading sunlight. I feel the fertility of what this land has become as if I could nearly bottle it up.

It is hot and steamy on this hill we call home this evening. A welcome sign after many years where it was void of life. On this hot day after a good rain storm, the lushness feels more like a jungle than a barren plot of land, and I feel deeply connected to that feeling as I now see all the ways I have sown many seeds in my own life that have brought vitality. I sense this land and I are walking right alongside one another in our story. In the ways I have healed her, she has healed me.  

Many evenings when the kids have gone to sleep and the whole day feels like a bed we perfectly made, I sit here to feel the beauty of these summer nights unfold around me. I breathe in the warm air and feel joy in my bones that nothing else in this life could ever give. Everything blends together on these evenings as the sun lingers high in the sky. 

This was from july 20,2016 when we went under contract on the 10 acres. This image is taken exactly where a year later we broke ground on our home.

It is overwhelming how full of life something can be that only six months earlier was white, desolate, and frozen. I find it inspiring to be here in the final days of the chamomile and the beginning of the blooming of the cosmos. It is like watching a musical performance, where one plant replaces another and then another, all in perfect timing. This journey will continue until the snow comes again. This little world we call home was fallow just years prior. This dreamy world right before me is overwhelming, not just because it is beautiful and full of life but because I am visibly and tangibly experiencing what can grow with love, attention, care, hard work, and the magic of nature combined.

As my feet absorb the sun's warmth through the damp grass and clover, I think back to the moment we stepped onto this land for the first time. I felt called to this place. It began in a dream years before I knew where this land was. I was just 22 and dreamt of a hill with a long drive and a house facing southwest. I remember vividly the dream of entering a home being built with a little boy. It felt so real. All I longed for when I woke was to be there.

10/8/2016 right after moved back to Michigan we began staking the house location. The goal? To not get rid of any trees. We never touched one other than a few juniper bushes.

Eight years later, it would be, along with a baby on my hip. Now here on this hill that sits nestled at the base of Leelanau Peninsula - "The Land of Delight," as it is called - I feel that I am home and that the land senses the same. 

8/11/2017 the framing was underway on our home. The dream I had in 2009 was quite literally coming true.

Where our home sits on the top of a hill, there was nothing but gravel and an array of dry pokey plants. The first time we visited the land, hawks were squealing overhead, hunting for life to take as their own, and crunchy spotted knapweed was just trying to make a life in sandy, rocky soil desiring to make sure nothing else would ever grow. Yet even then, I knew this would be where we would build a fruitful life and a whole new ecosystem. I knew it wouldn't just be where we would build our home but a deep connection to the earth as we had never done before. I felt this land even then knew the magic we would create together. 

As the fading evening light darkens the valleys, I gather the blooming lavender. The air erupts in the calming fragrance of these plants that have become good friends. As I bundle the blossoms and place them in my woven basket, I think of when we finished the home and that following spring, the melted snow revealed land that needed us to cultivate grasses and native plants. It needed organic matter spread around the acre dug for a home and now open to growing a whole new world. We raked that acre by hand with a toddler at our sides. We pulled rocks to make room for deep roots, not just for the grass seed but unknowingly in ourselves. We dispersed an abundance of wild grass seeds and wildflowers to create healthier soil so more beautiful things could make this their home too. No garden would grow just yet; it was still only a dream. We knew we had to create a vision that considered the land we had been entrusted with. We had to ask what would work in this place to bring it to its full potential. Questions requiring learning, observation, and patience are things that the busy world outside this land doesn't speak kindly of, but I wanted to apply back to our life and how I tended to this land.  

04/30/2018 the spring, we grew grass and perennial rye to restore the land. This is also the spring our son rode his little car down the hill while we pulled rocks and raked. He was fine, but phew, never dull those days.

As we asked these questions, I found myself doing the same in myself as a new mother. I felt the quake of letting go of what was to make space for new chapters, but I didn’t know what it was. The land seemed to be opening me just as we had opened her. This process isn’t without struggle or pain. Letting go of who we were to open ourselves to who we could become takes time, patience, and community. In this instance, we were each other’s community. Something I didn’t see then, but now, with my basket full of lavender, I meander the flower beds, and I think of the following years when a field of wild grasses rose around us up to our shoulders after a harsh winter. Little by little, we watched an ecosystem emerge as we poured more money, sweat, blood, and time into this place. We knew we were obligated to create something that built back this land in a way it hadn't been given a chance to be before. We knew that great things could come if we kept giving to this soil under our feet that we now knew as home. We didn't see this place as something we owned, but instead, that this land was entrusted to us. We felt and still feel an obligation to leave the land far better than we ever found it, and in turn, this was true for ourselves in the wake as well.

Those years we worked hard to bring this place to life in a new way. We hoped the soil would shift from rocks and sand to rich loam and be full of worms, bugs, and mycelium that identified healthy and fertile soil. We spread trailers of even more manure from a small horse and llama farm around the corner to bring in nutrients and to help build a world of microbes we would never see with our raw eyes. We added chickens to roam wildly so they could help as well. We took the slow way on this path because we know all too well that great things come when you do them from the ground up. We knew that it was best to focus on the quality of the foundation more than just what would grow there. We knew the plants would easily thrive if the soil were healthy. We could have done it quickly and mechanized, but as I wander among the grapevines we planted half a decade ago, I am thankful for how we chose differently. I am grateful as the scattered wildflowers bloom along the hillside and the butterflies dance amongst the fields from one bloom to another in the pink and purple glow of the just beginning to set sun. 

08/19/2018 We somehow did it. We grew grass and something came up in that soil. We held dinners in the setting sun.

As I open the gate to our garden, I think of the year we built the fence and the coop. The fence wasn't perfect, and neither was the coop. In fact, many things that year were off-center because that year wasn't normal either. It was the year we journeyed through the pandemic, working through being new parents to two, all while laying a new foundation for our careers and who we were. Everything felt it was upside down at times. Building a new garden and a coop was simply our way to find direction in a time when all felt directionless. I see every challenging moment still in the nails in the coop siding. How often we weren't any different than this land; growing, expanding, finding our way, working the soil to allow new things to grow when the time was finally right. I can see it all now, years later, but it all felt messy at the time.

08/03/2020 Our 2nd child was born. Mike had lost his main contract for work. We were living on a prayer through that year with 2 kids home, but we found our footing by setting new ones in a coop and garden.

I think now about how we set footers for the fence while a baby slept in a stroller, how I watched my son draw with crayons and climb trees while I laid compost. Building myself, them, and this land all with each other. It was some of the most intense days, but I couldn’t wait on any of it because it all needed the work, and I truly believe the work had to be done together. It brought identity, clarity, and processing to each piece. The ebb and flow of the needs of it all was what brought through lines and connections that ultimately began to change all of us at once.

The soil was terrible when we began that garden that year when the world felt like it was shaking itself into a new reality in 2020. The garden fence went deep. We hit a pipe in the ground that we didn't expect. The flowers didn't survive. The framing of the coop could have been better. A lot of anxiety, frustration, and searching went into creating this space, but yet years later, I see something full of abundance and potential emerging all around me.

The garden now overflows with plants soaring to the sky. The soil they grow in is rich. I will gather tomatoes, squash, raspberries, and herbs to feed us all summer and fall here three years later. The abundance of this garden will grace the plates of many gatherings with friends, something I dreamt of doing once again during the darker days of the pandemic. I don't find it a coincidence that the place this garden sits now is where we used to hold so many dinners the days before the pandemic, and the year we began the garden was the year we couldn't do that. I didn't see that then, but I see it now as I gather flowers to give to a friend having a tough week, and soon when August comes, I will gather the ingredients for a simple meal on a table in our garden with friends. Candles will be lit as we finish the meal and enjoy a dessert of berry crisp in the setting sun. Our lives were made fuller by experiencing the changes that year brought in more ways than one. 

09/18/2022 all the things the land and I have built side by side in one image.

What I see now as I wander the rows in this garden is that during that year, the garden called to us, and we answered. The land showed us the path forward that would heal and connect us in new ways. I can see it all in the evening light as I harvest herbs with the mosquitos overhead. There was hope in the land here even when I felt the most lost, sad, and struggling...I listened to her, trusted her, and let her hold me. We have healed and are fruiting in ways neither of us could have imagined.

As I gather up the final bits of the harvest from this evening and the warm tones of the sunset linger on the edges to the south and north of the sky as the last remnants of the Buck Moon rise to the East, I breathe in the truth that great things truly do take time and my God they are worth pursuing. Building an ecosystem from nothing is a rebellious pursuit in a world of instant gratification, but I would beg to say it is one we should all find time for at some point in these fleeting moments of life. A life lived alongside a piece of land where you grow and expand side by side in conversation is what I believe we were designed for when the cosmic dust settled to create the flesh we wear now. 

09/18/2022 the garden years later with healthy soil, healthy children, and a new self full of growth and wisdom. Something only the land and I could have given each other.

This land we are lucky to tend to is far from complete, just as we can say the same for ourselves. We have a long journey ahead of growing alongside one another. The apple trees need protection from winter nibblers if they are to grow and bear fruit. The hill here needs more shade, and it will take some time still, but the more I lean in and realize it will take time, the more grace I have for the time it takes to care for myself as well. I have known for a long time that life isn't a sprint, but it is a long-reaching story intertwined between us, nature, and generations. I feel it in the air here in the depths of July when it all feels alive at once. I can sense the gift of time and tending to each other side by side, like walking a journey to only become better with each small step we take. I rest, break, rebuild, and bloom, and do it right alongside her and her right alongside me.