Where the Green Grass Grows

 "What is a farm but a mute gospel?"
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am continually amazed at how farming and rural life has just seeped into every fiber of my being. I go from thinking: "This is too hard. I cannot keep up" To feeling: "How could I possibly do anything but this?" 

I did not want to be a farmer. I did not want to live rural. But I loved my husband. And this is the life he dreamed of. And so we discussed and compromised and planned and prayed. 

And suddenly his dreams became my dreams. His dreams because our dreams.

And I ended up forty-five minutes away from a town with a Target.

One thing I know now for sure. There is no way after living rural I could ever live un-rural. 

Impossible.

We belong here. 

Raising my kids where the green grass grows. 

This is my home.

I flashback to some words from a favorite book of mine: 

"As much as you transform the land by farming, farming transforms you. 

 It seeps into your skin along with the dirt that abides permanently in the creases of your thickened hands, the beds of your nails ... farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world. And maybe you realize that it is beyond those acres or in your distant past, back in the ream of TiVo and cublicles, of take-out food and central heat and air, in that country where discomfort has nearly disappeared, that you were deprived. Deprived of the pleasure of desire, of effort and difficulty and meaningful accomplishment. A farm asks, and if you don't give enough, the primordial forces of death and wilderness will overrun you. So naturally you give, and then you give some more, and then you give to the point of breaking, and then and only then it gives back, so bountifully it overfills not only your root cellar but also that parched and weedy little patch we call the soul . . . How was it possible that this abundance had always existed, and I had not known it? I felt, of all damn things, safe. Anything could happen in the world. Planes could crash into buildings, jobs could disappear, people could be thrown out of their apartments, oil could run dry, but here, at least, we would eat." Kristin Kimball

This video below is the ringtone on my phone. This is my life. And I love it.