hey nineteen

Nineteen years is nothing to sneeze at. Nineteen years, four children, one farm, one hand built house, untold agricultural endeavors and unschooled adventures later and here we are. It is not by accident that we are here.

You see, falling in love is the easy part. You can do that with train wrecks. I certainly have. That was perhaps the one thing about my husband that told me he needed to be my husband -- he was different from all the rest of the people I’d ever loved. Although I couldn’t exactly define how he was different, but I knew it in that way you know things deep down.

And so he and I became us. Then there were more of us. And we knew from way back then the sorts of things that were important to us -- that we wanted land (although we seriously contemplated staying put in the city), we didn’t want debt , we wanted kids, we wanted independence, that we were about “natural” and “holistic” and stuff like that. And I wanted animals in general and horses specifically.

There has always been a direction we’ve been moving in. Sometimes we’ve moved more slowly and sometimes more quickly, but we’ve moved. When other people thought that perhaps we should be working on the house, or making more money, or otherwise being more socially acceptable, we just kept moving in our direction. Luck is when something bad happens and you face it down and simply don’t allow it turn out badly. When you refuse to be tossed by the storms of life.

There is in life a force of sheer will that does indeed move mountains.