[title subtitle=”WORDS and IMAGE Jessica Sowards”][/title]
Six years ago, in April, we signed the papers to purchase our first home. For two weeks, we worked incredibly hard making repairs in escrow. Then, at the end of April, we moved to our blank canvas of four acres with a dream to turn it into a farm. I think I must have pinched myself a dozen times a day during that season of life. After all the years of dreaming of a little farm, we had stumbled upon a foreclosure in the middle of the rural woods of Central Arkansas and had somehow made it ours.
Do you know how other stages of your life, in retrospect, feel a little like they belonged to someone else entirely? As I adjusted into our country home and we began to grow our homesteading efforts, my suburban life slipped into memory. Close neighbors, quick runs to the store and walking the kids to school became a thing of the past. It’s funny, though. Now, six years after that initial city-to-country adjustment, I find myself reminiscing on my days of transition into farm life from a vantage point where a lot has changed.
Yesterday I flew home from Iowa, where I’d spent four days making a video of a bird hatchery for our YouTube channel, Roots and Refuge Farm. I noticed, as soon as the plane begain to near the Little Rock airport, green had exploded upon the world beneath me. I walked through the automatic airport doors, wheeling my luggage and toting my heavy camera bag, and immediately paused to peel off a layer of clothes. Spring had come to the south while I’d been in the still-frozen and brown north.
It was nearly dark when I pulled into my driveway. I had just enough time to embrace my husband and boys, pet my dogs, and go for a walk to check on the farm. The piglets seemed to have doubled in size in a week. The grass had begun to grow again, thank goodness. I momentarily pondered our plans to rotationally graze the goats and alpacas to make the most of our two-acre pasture. While I was gone, my husband Jeremiah had used a borrowed excavator to clear three trees in our backyard. A monstrous pile of branches towered above me exactly where our new high-tunnel will sit a couple of weeks from now.
I checked on the seedlings in the little glass greenhouse, which was glowing warmly in the middle of the garden. The peppers and flower sprouts had changed hugely in my time away. Then by flashlight, I discovered that the row of peas I planted weeks ago in the garden beds had finally germinated and stood two inches tall. The onion and leek sets had taken fine to being transplanted, a task I’d done a day before leaving. I sighed with relief.
Then I went to bed early, because spring is different from winter. Winter is time to rest and recover but spring is time to work hard to harvest later.
This morning, when I ground coffee at 5 a.m., I heard the geese on the pond across the street. They are a quintessential sign of the emerging warmth. Every year, through the early spring months, flocks of geese make their stops here on their migratory trip back to their summer home. Suddenly, I was taken back to six years ago.
On one of those escrow-repair mornings, I woke up on the couch in the living room of this otherwise-empty house. We’d been homeowners for only a handful of days and had worked dawn to dusk on repairs, taking shifts staying home with the kids. The particular morning in memory was my first morning to ever wake up here. I’d stayed late painting, one of my favorite renovation chores.
We didn’t have curtains yet, and though I’d stayed up late, the blazing sun had kissed me awake during the early hours. I’ll never forget sitting on the front steps, surveying our blank dream-come-true and listening to the geese on the pond across the street.
City girls are not accustomed to waking to the sound of a hundred geese just across the street. They were an anomaly to me then. They were the first realization that life really was changing, that I was really going to have a farm and food really would come from my yard.
This morning, however, when I brewed coffee at five in the morning, after the week of travel and adventure, those geese sounded like home. The rising sun unveiled my sprawling gardens and the fresh growth of new green grass. Shortly after the light dawned, the chickens begaun spilling out of the coop to scratch for early worms. It was extraordinary for how long it had been desired, but at the same time it was ordinary for the fact that it happens every day. It is simply home.
Holding my mug at the window, hearing the goose song and surveying the fruit of our labors, I couldn’t help but feel how much more life can change. Just like I used to remember our life in town with a touch of awe that things had changed, it’s strange now to remember when all of this was new. It’s strange to remember what it was like to just be completely bumbling through.
We are still learning and still growing. The rooster’s crow that floats through the morning breeze is both beautiful and completely normal to me. A pantry full of food that we cultivated from seeds is both fulfilling and commonplace. We have adjusted. This is our life.
However, just like we continue to grow, we continue to dream. My prayers are alive with the possibility of tomorrow. I find myself, in mornings like this one, in the great tension that lies between absolute awe-filled contentment and the burning desire for more. I imagine a great glass greenhouse with a community garden, a farm to table restaurant, and an education center teaching interns regenerative farming.
I dream of a day when our vision has grown to such a place that this exact moment feels a little foreign to me. But for now, I will sit at the window and drink my coffee. For now, I will feel overwhelmed with gratitude to be home. For now, I will thank God for the geese and their song that tells me I’m exactly where I belong.
To watch Jessica’s garden tours, visit her YouTube channel, Roots and Refuge.
