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A 3 Acre Farm

A 3 Acre Farm

Category Archives: Story

I Love You, but not You

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by a3acrefarm in Story

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

burdock, crabgrass, dandilions, forget-me-nots, parenting, roses, Roundup

Don’t hate me because I love Roundup. I have way too much work to do. If I decide that some particularly loathsome vegetation needs to go away, I don’t have time to be nice about it. So this morning when I was out raining death on burdock while carefully avoiding the dainty forget-me-nots growing just as wildly in the same area, I thought, “What’s up with that?”

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Why is one plant intolerable and another welcome to live here with me as it pleases? There’s no rhyme nor reason to it. I don’t kill dandelions. I rather like them, actually. Crabgrass in the lawn? No Problem. It’s green, right? And why do roses get all the glory, thorny old things?

Who decides what goes and what’s worth protecting?

For over ten years, Tim and I have parented a child we met when he was just a little guy. He’d already had a tough life by then, and we wanted to help make it better. Some things have been better, but mostly it’s been hard. Really hard. “Good thing he’s so handsome,” well-meaning friends sometimes say, as though his striking good looks could be of any value when he’s suspended from school. Again.

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Caring for a child who takes everything out of you and gives back almost nothing can be a lonely business. I don’t fault anyone who doesn’t understand why we keep trying. I didn’t get it, either, until I fell in love with this boy who wasn’t born to me. As exhausted and discouraged and sad as we are, I am so grateful that, when I first saw this child, I did not turn my face away.

So, who decides what’s worth protecting?

I do.

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She Begins

29 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by a3acrefarm in Story

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

apple, clothesline, farm, garden, land, orchard, soil

This is the story of a woman who loved a farm and had to leave it behind. It was a small farm by the standards of some; 65 acres of gardens, raspberries, wild strawberries, fiddleheads, an old apple orchard, a new orchard, potato fields, woods and dreams. It was a farm with a hill at the center. From the house she could watch the sunset, then walk up the farm road to the top of the hill and watch the sun set again.

The worst part about the leaving was not missing the house or the dear neighbors or even the moving far away. It was the aching for the land; the deep, deep longing for one piece of earth to call “our farm”. The new garden at the new house in the new town did not soothe the ache. Neither did the peach trees, nor the forsythia, nor the beds of blooming perennials. The land belonged to someone else, and even the rose bush brought from the farm refused to grow.

This is also the story of a woman whose passion for the soil brought her home to a corner of land. The orchard was ancient and long untended. There was no garden, but wild strawberries filled the field. There was a clothesline. “This is where we will build our life together,” she said. “And this is where a corner of land will become a three acre farm.”

Come along, then, for a journey as long as this is best with companions.

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Above Photos By: Hannah Robertson

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