Heather Huffman's Blog, page 5

My Own Ever After: Chapter Fourteen

Flying Need to start at the beginning? How is possible that I haven’t posted an update in nearly four months? Oh yeah, life. This morning alone, my house looks like a war zone. Our only toilet is broken. I had to run one kid through the ATM on our way to school to get $10 for a choir shirt. The other had to go in late because we all forgot to put the clothes in the dryer last night and it was go in late or go in underwear. I’m still trying to crowbar the oldest out of bed before he’s due at work. I am hovering on the edge of sick. It will take an act of God for my budget to work out this month. I am behind in freelancing, writing, and pretty much every other area of life because I took a weekend off. And I got stopped by a marching band not once but twice this morning because they practice in my neighborhood and the Christmas parade is this weekend.

And you know what? I’ve never been happier in my life. So much has happened and changed since summer. I don’t even know where to begin, really.

And let's be honest: Everyone needs a marching band to usher in their Monday.

The romance writer in me wants to start with “I met a guy…” but it’s too soon to say more than that, other than it’s nice to smile when my phone buzzes at me. Something about the possibility of having someone who makes me smile has made me realize that the gap in my publication schedule had very little to do with my hectic life. The silence had much more to do with the fact that the girl who loved love stories had gone away. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be attracted to someone, to flirt. To feel special. It’s hard to write with any authenticity about warmth and hope and love when your soul hasn’t felt any of those things in so long they’d become no more than a distant memory.

But with everything going on, everything that’s transpired in the last four months, the fact that I want to lead with that makes me roll my eyes at myself.

Last summer, my sister was diagnosed with cancer and we still had a lot of unanswered questions. In the months since, she’s had surgery and undergone radiation. There’s a lot they don’t tell you as you’re heading into treatment, like that your skin can peel off in reaction to it. That and other side effects have put my sweet, sweet angel of a sister through more pain than any human should have to bear. But she has borne it, with strength and grace. Because that’s who she is. Just last week, she got to ring the bell indicating that her treatments were finished. Now begins the road to recovery, but at least she has started down that path.

This year has also seen my father diagnosed with dementia, his greatest fear realized. His health in general has been failing for a while, though I suspect it’s at least partly in response to the diagnosis. Then, in October, he was hospitalized for a week. We came very close to losing him and the doctors still can’t tell us why. They stabilized and released him, but he continues to waste away while we can do little besides watch. Watch and soak up every moment we can while our family remains intact.

He’d probably be angry with me for saying anything, so I hesitate to include this. But wrestling with the notion of losing him has been difficult not just for me, but for my children. He’s been a strong force in their lives, and he’s played a major role in teaching my boys what it means to be a man. As a child, my relationship with my father was tumultuous at best. But I've also adored him since infancy, and he's shaped who I am today. He and I have long since found healing. We’ve found the closeness I craved in my younger years.

In the everyday, I press on. I look at what needs to be done and help where I can. But as I write this, tears fill my eyes. Because I mourn not only what is to come, but what's already passed. For an all-too-brief window we had a family that was strong and close. Now that dynamic has changed. We're scattered. There is uncertainty. Life and circumstance have changed us. Still, I cling to the strength of my sisters, no matter the distance between us. And I am thankful for the base my parents gave us.

At least four times during the past 20 years, I have toed up to the notion of being an English teacher. Every time, I chicken out. As I was deciding what to do with my struggling business and how best to keep a roof over our heads, it hit me that it was time to stop resisting. I think I just wanted to be a rebel - after all, both of my sisters are teachers. Perhaps I relished being the oddball, no matter how much I lamented it as a child.

Once the decision was made, things moved so quickly I can only believe it was Divine intervention. To make a long story short, I've been substitute teaching in the Buffalo schools for a little over a month now while I study for my certification test through ABCTE. At first, my boys were hesitant. The conversation went something like this.

"I don't know mom…"

"Don't you want me in your school?" I was wounded.

"It's not that. These kids. They aren't like us. They're pretty wild."

"You don't think I can handle it?"

"It's not the kids I'm worried about."

Touché.

I forged ahead, nervous but determined. I rarely like to admit I'm afraid of anything, but I was seriously afraid of those first few days in the classroom. It was not only a new job, but one utterly different from anything I'd done before. Sure, I'd taught adults. I guess a room full of disgruntled IT guys compares to rebellious 5th graders in some ways, but it was still pretty foreign.

To my profound relief, I survived. Not only did I survive, I enjoyed it. And I only had one conversation get out of hand.

I'd written "Ms. Huffman" on the board. I'm too old to be a Miss and I'm not a Mrs. This was apparently a new concept for these 5th graders.

"You left a letter out of your name," one of them informed me.

"No, I didn't. I meant to write Ms."

"Why?"

"Because it doesn't matter if I'm married or not. You can use Ms either way."

"You're not married?" a girl asked.

"That's not the point."

At this juncture, another young man joined the conversation. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

That elicited a chorus of "oohs" from the class. They had interpreted the question as this kid’s way of volunteering for the position.

"No. I have three sons, one just at the other end of the hall. But we're not talking about that right now, we should be doing our bell work."

"How do you have kids if you're not married?"

This is when I thought Really? I'm the only unmarried mother in this town? Instead, I replied "I used to be married. Now I'm not, and we're done talking about this."

The boy who started it all gasped. "You got fired from being married?"

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I'm super proud that I didn't retort that I'd fired him. Instead, I managed to get the conversation back on track. Lord only knows how.

Since that day, I've taught everywhere from 1st grade through high school seniors. I've covered for the Special Education classroom and the middle school band teacher. I find myself increasingly impressed with the kind of person who chooses to educate children for a living. And I am increasingly proud to be joining their ranks. The kids have come to know me. Whichever school I’m at, I have kiddos coming up to me and hugging me or saying hi.  I'm crazy about them. And my boys have even decided they like having me in their schools.

Despite all of the proverbial frolicking in the sunshine, I'm exhausted. Every day is a bit of a whirlwind as I learn this new world and study for the test that will give me my full-fledged teaching certificate. I feel the time crunch as my window closes before hiring for next year begins - I'm trying desperately to have everything in order to be one of the candidates for any jobs that might open.

Another pretty big event for me was taking advantage of the open mic nights at my beloved coffee shop. A dear friend and I worked like crazy to prepare four songs for our 15 minutes on stage, only to arrive and find out we were the only ones signed up. We wound up singing more like 7 songs, a couple of which we’d never even sung together before. I know I’m a far cry from a professional, but we weren’t half bad and I loved every single second of it. It was so incredibly freeing to sing in front of a room full of people, not worried about how it sounded, only thrilling in the song.

The old Heather wouldn’t have done that.

I also am pleased to report that I’ve lost over half of the weight I’d gained with the ankle debacle from a few years back. I still have a bit to go, but I feel so much better already. Dylan and I have taken to hiking with our dogs, exploring whatever trails strike our fancy whenever we can squirrel away an afternoon. I love it. Hiking days are some of my favorite days; they make me feel gloriously alive.

There was a moment when I began to worry that my horses would be the price I had to pay for my freedom. Every time I thought I had something lined up for them, the sands would shift and plans would change. And just when I was desperate enough to consider selling my darlings, friends stepped up, things fell into place, and the horses were moved on the day the land changed hands. One more day and they’d have been homeless.

I’m sure a smarter person would sell them. Heaven knows we can’t really afford them. But I am clinging to the hope that someday soon I’ll have my world rebuilt enough that I can once again buy a little patch of land for me and my girls. (I guess I’ll let the human children come too…) That’s a dream I’m not willing to walk away from just yet.

There was no last minute miracle for my little company, though. It went quietly into the night, leaving behind memories and a handful of clients who I continue to freelance for. I thought I was ready to completely walk away from marketing for a while, but it seems that world isn’t through with me yet. It makes answering the question “What do you do for a living” all kinds of fun. I’m a writer, teacher, and marketer. Maybe that last one will drop off the list someday; maybe not. I enjoy each aspect of my career. Each reflects something of me.

Oh, and I joined forces with some amazing authors to launch a website and Facebook group by and for women. It's a judgment-free zone on the internet where we celebrate all the many facets of being a woman today. It's going to be so much more - we have big plans - and it deserves so much more than a paragraph mention, but a paragraph is all I have in me at the moment. 

I feel like there’s more to say, more to share, but the thoughts and feelings are swirling through me, as elusive to catch as the clouds. All I know is that 2017 has been a year of profound change for me and my children. It’s only now that I’ve shed the chains of my past that I begin to realize how heavy a burden they were.

And today, in this moment, while the weather is warm and my heart is happy and full, I feel like I can finally spread my wings and fly.​

Stay in the Game

It's football season, which for us - like so many families - means our schedule is packed now through October, and the vast majority of the dates blocked out have something to do with the gridiron. No need to guess where we'll be on Friday nights, either. We'll don our black and red to sit on metal seats where we'll stomp and clap and cheer ourselves hoarse. Well, I will. My sons will spend quit a bit of that time walking around with their respective herd of teenagers.

I've watched many of these boys play since their 7th grade year. I've watched them mature, as young men and as players. We've been the underdogs in these parts for a long time. The glory days are something I hear whisperings of but, having only lived here for 5 years, I wasn't around to witness. And while I acknowledge that the surrounding towns might not think much of us, our football team has heart. They have a spunk, a grit, that I admire.

If you talk to any of the players or go to many games, you'll hear the rumblings that the refs don't like us much. Calls seldom seem fair and the opposing teams often blatantly cheat and aren't called on it. (For reals - my son was bitten once on the field. I've seen kids kicked while down, after the play had stopped. It's not cool.)

But, from the relative comfort of the stands, I can also see that point when our boys give up. They come so close to victory and then you can see them decide the odds are stacked too much against them, and they stop giving it their all. Sure, some of them hang on until the bitter end, but enough of them check out that the crowd starts to check out, and the inevitable end comes.

And, in all of my bleacher wisdom, I know that until they decide they have a chance to win, they have no chance to win.

My oldest son only played football with this team for two years. A broken arm ended his second season and he opted to homeschool after that because he was eager to finish early and find his great adventure. Blake, number two son, couldn't play football because of his head injury. And, in truth, I think he doesn't mind so much. He only would have played because it was the thing to do, not because he loved the sport.

My number three son, though. That boy lives and breathes football and now that he's in 7th grade, his time has come. He graduates from Mighty Mites to being part of the football team. I watch him on the field with the other boys and I know they're beginning a journey together, just as his brother began a journey before him.

Last night, after the game was done, I listened as Number Three told me every bad or unfair call he'd seen. As I replied, I realized that I needed to heed my own words.

You see, the last time I was a football mom, I didn't feel as keenly how alone I was because my other two children were still young enough to always sit with me. Now they're off and gone with their friends and I can't hide from my solitude. For me, only part of my mind was on the game last night.

I have to admit that I spent most of it feeling very much isolated - from the moms whose sons stayed on the team to play all six years together; from the moms who are married; from the younger, single crowd; from the people who've lived here all their lives... you get the picture. I sat there, painfully aware of how alone I was and the weight of every terrible thing from the past week just kept getting heavier and heavier until I slunk home, drank two glasses of wine, and watched an episode of Outlander while wishing I'd get sucked back in time. Only--let's be real--I wouldn't end up in Sam Heughan's lap, no matter how much I wish I would.

But anyway, back to my reply. I told him, "Life never fights fair and there will be many times when it seems like the ref isn't calling the game like He should. But you keep fighting until it's over. As long as you're fighting, there's a chance you'll win. Stop fighting and your chances go to zero. If you want to be a football player, then wrap your head around it now - the refs will not call fair games, the other teams won't like you, and it will be hard. But you still gotta fight."

So enough moping. I am alone and it is not the end of the world. There is a lot of scary/awful stuff happening in my world right now, but it won't last forever. Because I choose to fight. 

My Own Ever After: Testing My Wings

Today is my 40th birthday and the 3-month anniversary of moving into my new home. I still haven’t tired of the feel of my toes in between my sheets, of having a bed that is mine. And so, even though the coffee shop and a birthday latte beckon me, I lie here a bit longer, relishing the sheets on my skin. The kitten we rescued is nestled at the juncture of my neck and shoulder, purring. My Holly dog lies alongside me, her ears alert as she watches the parakeets chatter happily and flit about their new, expanded cage. My windows are flung open and an unseasonably cool breeze chills what little skin peeks out from the covers. Yes, even the coffee shop can wait on mornings like this.​

If I emerged from a cocoon three months ago, a new and more beautiful creature than I had been before, this house has been the branch where I’ve basked in the sun, allowing my wings to dry while I figured out what to do with them.

We moved in with very little--the clothes on our backs, a smattering of dishes and furniture, and camping chairs for the living room. It’s a bit mind-boggling how quickly that changed, through the grace of God and the kindness of others. One old gentleman in particular is a good example of that kindness. For a month straight, things would mysteriously appear on our front porch. I’d see him at Bible study and ask if he new anything about it and he would blush, duck his head and smile.

Bit by bit, the empty spaces were filled until it was our home, comfortable and full of peace. It’s a peace others notice right away, often commenting as much when they cross the threshold.

The past three months have not been without their trials. There have been money woes, there always are, but we’ve met them with faith and the need is always met just in time.

My beloved 16 Hand Marketing has undergone so many changes that I sometimes wonder if it will survive and I know that if it does, it’ll be forever changed. But that’s okay, because maybe it’s already served its purpose. It reminded me I’m alive with dreams left to dream. They don’t all have to come true to make them worth having.
I have two family members who’ve received terrifying diagnoses this summer. One will be okay, one will not. The face of my family is changing and I’m grieving it. Most days, it feels like I’m inching my way along, trying to find my way through a dark and unfamiliar room.

There has been uncertainty in the past months - with my job, my horses, next steps… But there is hope. There is peace. And I am keenly aware that those two things were the cry of my heart leading up to my decision to leave my husband.

I am learning each day to let go of fears of failure, of being in trouble, of being too much, of being not enough. As I watch my children shift and grow in response to their changed environment, I’ve realized that I’m not the only one who has been unfettered, who is learning to navigate our new normal. Still, they are thriving in their new worlds and it does this mama’s heart good to see, even if I miss them now with their new social lives and space to spread out.

This week, we’ve been blessed with glorious weather. I’m telling myself it’s God’s birthday gift to me (I mean, seriously, how often does Missouri see jacket weather in early August?) I have spent my evenings on a football field, watching my youngest carve out a space for himself in a world his oldest brother once dominated and I treasure this moment.

Yes, there is ugliness swirling about my world. There is uncertainty. There are times when I feel my loneliness more keenly. But more than anything, life is good.

A delightfully bookish evening

I suppose all of the people and places that brush against our lives shape us, but some more so than others. Some people you can know for years without ever truly knowing them. Others, it takes only a short while for them to become the dearest of friends.

If you read my recent series, My Own Ever After , you might remember me mentioning my local coffee shop, Maple and Main. My oldest son and I have spent an obscene amount of time there in the past six months, at first because the internet at our house in the country was sketchy and now because I’ve yet to hook up internet at our new house in town. Over the course of those months, Jacquelyn and Lyal--the mother/son duo who owns the place--have become friends I can’t quite imagine my life without. 

We’ve spent enough time there that they hired Dylan to be a barista. Lyal works with us at 16 Hand, making video and graphics. My younger boys mow their lawns. It’s this fun little money loop, where we’re just passing it back and forth between families.

I don’t know if so quickly formed a bond of friendship because we found people as creative and quirky as us, because we can relate to mother/son team who are friends and business partners as well, or because of the sheer volume of time we’ve spent with them this year. Whatever the cause, they've helped me reshape my world into a brighter one.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a book event or made any public appearance. I’ve been in survival mode, I guess, barely eeking out a book a year, let alone enjoying those books or my readers. But that, like so many things in my life, is changing.

What better way and place to change it than with the inaugural book event at Maple and Main? I will be one of three local authors appearing at Breaking in the Bookcase on June 1 from 6 – 8 pm. I truly hope you can join us that night, for so many reasons. The top three being: I adore this place and want to share it with youIt’s my first foray back into events—I want it to be as lively and fun as the days of book parties at O’Malley’s on Cherokee Street. No, there’s no alcohol at Maple and Main, but they make a mean latte. (Warning: the coffee at the chain shops will pale in comparison after you’ve had the coffee at Maple & Main)They have regular music events that pack the house. Lyal (a musician) informs me musicians are way cooler than writers. I really want to prove we writers can hold our own. With reasoning that good, how could you afford to miss it? Speaking of afford, admission is free. Buy a book if you want, but it’s okay if you don’t. Just buy a yummy drink and meet cool people at a delightfully bookish evening!

My Own Ever After: Chapter Twelve

Stepping into Ever After Prologue If I ever begin to question God’s timing again—scratch that—the next time I begin to question God’s timing, I need to remember this chapter, this moment in my life. I felt compelled to write my story last fall. I ignored the prompting in my spirit to write all winter long. Late winter, I finally put fingers to keyboard. It wasn’t until I decided to release it on my blog each week that I truly began to make progress. That was 12 weeks ago. At the time, I knew my marriage was over, but I didn’t know where I was headed, where this story was headed.
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As I sit to (belatedly) write this chapter, I am listening to my Charlie-dog snore contentedly on my bed. In the other room, I can hear my boys watching a movie as they wind down from their day. Beside me, my budgies are chattering my ear off, presumably telling me all about their day. What’s special about this moment is that it’s happening in my new house. My new home.

We thought we’d found the perfect house to rent, but it fell through. Another house seemed okay—we were all a little meh about it but figured it would do—but it had six people competing for it. Houses for rent in this town are scarce at the moment. So, at Dylan’s prompting, I called on a house that we’d seen for sale in town. I thought it would be too small. I thought there was no way I could buy a house. I thought a lot of things.

But I prayed that God would lead us home, and then I did my very best to truly leave it in his hands. The first time I saw this house, I wasn’t sure. I walked through it a second time and thought, this just might work. By the third walk-through, I was falling in love. Chris, like me, had to walk through it a couple of times to be sold. Blake was cool from the get-go. Dylan, from the moment he saw it, knew this was the one. Whenever I started to doubt, he reminded me this was the one.

There is a part of me that is tempted to sit and write out the details from that moment to this one because they are too perfectly, intricately timed to be coincidence. But I think the telling might get a bit convoluted, the details mean more to me than they would to another. Still, I am convinced to the very fiber of my being that God did, in fact, lead us home.

The house might not look like much to someone else. It’s a little white house with a green roof. It was built in 1900, which we think is terribly cool but does come with its own set of challenges. It’s officially a two bed, one bath, but it has a screened in porch on the back that I’m turning into my room. The first bedroom is massive, so two of the boys easily divided it to accommodate both of them. We actually wound up with quite a bit more space. The house is adorable and we’re even more in love than we were before. It’s in easy walking distance of anywhere we truly need to be, so not having a car is survivable.

Of course, our little haven isn’t without its share of trouble. At first, the water heater didn’t work. A tip from a friend at church help solve that problem, so we had hot water by our second full day. About the time the tank filled and got good and hot, Dylan was tightening the hot water hose on the washing machine when the pipe it connected to snapped, effectively creating a volcano of hot water shooting into my kitchen. I was trying to hold the pipes together, screaming “Make it stop. Somebody make it stop.” Teenage boys, some not even my own, were scrambling like mad to comply, even though they had no idea what to do.

By the time we got the water shut off, we had a good 50 gallons of hot water in my kitchen and Dylan and I were soaked to the bone. My drywall, well, I kinda wanted to try wood paneling in that spot anyway. A friend and former neighbor, God bless him, came out and taught Dylan how to fix the pipe, offering to walk him through anything else that arose after this. The entire weekend, the entire move process, was a testament to the amazing people we have in our lives. We are blessed beyond measure.

Now that I don’t have hot water spraying me in the face, I can laugh about the incident. But I think, on some level, it was a sobering moment for Dylan. Right, wrong, or indifferent, he’s been the de facto second adult in the house since he was, I don’t know, ten. In that moment, I think he realized that he was stepping into a whole new level of adulthood. I want to reassure him that he’s still a teenager. The burden to support us, to fix the broken pipes and fill the pantry, falls on me. But the reality is that he will accept more of that burden than he should. It’s in his nature.

To their credit, his brothers are stepping up. They’re mowing lawns for extra money rather than asking me for it. They’re helping around the house, being more responsible for their own schedules. Whatever the road ahead holds, we’re in this thing together. We’ve got each other’s back.

It’s been not quite a week since we loaded our meager belongings on my daddy’s trailer and hauled them to our new house. Already, a friend commented that I look like a new woman. I certainly feel like a new woman. I look back at the creature I had become and I don’t recognize her. She feels foreign to me.

So many people, when they hear about the divorce, express their sympathy. I feel bad, but I’m not sad. I miss my horses, my land. But even that isn’t as deep of an ache as I’d anticipated. There is such peace in our new home—even the dogs are calmer, happier. But I think it’s because I did my mourning a decade ago. There was a time when I wept for the passing of my marriage. But that time isn’t now.

My finances are no more certain than they were a week ago. There are still mountains in my path. But for the first time in a long time, I feel as if I can find joy even in the climb.

I don’t know what the future holds for me. I have no clue what my own ever after will look like. I told a friend recently that I feel like I’m staring at a blank canvas, wondering what to paint. Maybe the picture will include a love story of my own, maybe not. As lonely as I’ve been, I do know that I have to show myself at least as much respect as I expect others to show me. I hope I’ve learned my lesson to never again allow another to devalue my place in humanity. I have to be the kind of woman I write books about if I ever hope to meet the kind of man I write books about, if I ever hope to raise the kind of men I want my boys to be.

Whatever my ever after looks like, it’s out there. And I intend to find it.

My Own Ever After: Chapter 11

Chrysalis Prologue (if you need to catch up) In November of 2016, one wild and wooly year after I’d rejoined the corporate world, my body was giving me unmistakable signs that I couldn’t keep the pace I’d been trying to maintain. Whether it was warning me of a heart attack or the squeezing in my chest was from panic attacks, the stress of my life was starting to take its toll. I’d been working multiple part-time freelance jobs in addition to my job at Incredible Pizza, trying to keep our family afloat. It was beginning to dawn on me that I made more money at the freelance jobs than I did my day job. More and more, my oldest son Dylan and I began to discuss opening our own marketing firm.
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A couple of things happened that month that would once again change our path. First, I went to my boss at Incredible Pizza and explained that I couldn’t keep going with the status quo. After a few discussions, it was decided to farm one piece of my job out to a different department, bring in someone full-time to take over another piece of my job, and I would cut back to half-time from home to do the piece I’d originally been hired for: social media ads and strategy.

The second thing that happened was Booktrope friend and colleague Jesse James reached out to me on Facebook with a simple question, “Want to take over the universe together?”

My response was equally simple, “Sure.” Thus was the birth of 16 Hand Marketing. Sure, maybe being an entrepreneur isn’t the best way to reduce stress, but my gut told me it was the only way I would ever be able to truly support my kiddos while still having the flexibility I crave. And, being totally honest, it’s crazy how much I love this little company. In the five months since Dylan, Jesse, and I hung our shingle, we’ve assembled the most amazing team on the planet. I love each and every person we work with and I’m blessed beyond measure to spend my days creating magic with them. I’ve never been so proud of the things I’ve been part of as I have in the past five months, and I’ve never laughed so hard at work or felt so alive.

There are times, like right now, when I panic that I’ll drop the ball or somehow mess it up and 16 Hand will go away. But then Jesse reassures me that’s not gonna happen, and if it ever did, the company would just morph into something new.

Amusingly, Dylan and I are trying to run a digital marketing firm while having terrible internet at home.  And, in one of life’s snarky little twists, our subpar internet got ridiculously useless once we really needed it. We struggled through for about a month when we realized someone new had purchased the defunct coffee shop in town and had reopened under a new name, Maple and Main. We gave it a try—mostly for the WiFi, partly because we’re coffee shop kind of people.

I have to sheepishly admit that, despite it being our sole purpose for being there, it was our fourth visit to the shop before we got the WiFi password. The owner was always busy and I didn’t want to be a bother. Then it got to the point that we felt stupid not having asked already. Dylan and I both tend to overthink things, so we were in real danger of never finding out the password. Eventually, I mustered up the courage to ask and we were once again reunited with the interweb.

We wound up spending so much time at Maple and Main over the past four months that its owners have become dear friends. I can’t imagine my world without them; they’re such creative, kind, and lovely people. In many ways, I credit their friendship for helping bring me back from nearly slipping over the edge—them, and 16 Hand Marketing.

I am positive there are those who would hear my story and think of a dozen or more things I could have done differently, moves I could have made that were much smarter. Sometimes I can feel the judgment rolling off of people in my life, or at very least they’re baffled by my choices. One of my dearest friends here in Buffalo is a realtor; when she heard about the circumstances surrounding our move down here, she said “Oh Heather. I wish I’d known you then…” and proceeded to rattle of six different things we could have done differently that wouldn’t have left our family staggering under the weight of this tax burden. I wish I had known her then—she’s one of the kindest, most amazing people on the planet and I'm sure she could have made a difference—but I went with the advice and resources I had at the time. That seems to be a pattern for me.

Having never been in an actual bar fight, I can only guess at what it feels like. Still, the best comparison I can give is that my life has been something of a bar fight for at least the last six years, if not twenty. Life is bigger than me, an experienced fighter with muscles, and life doesn’t fight fair. Me and life, we’re in the parking lot and a crowd has gathered around to watch my opponent just absolutely kick the snot out of me. With each blow, I get up a little slower and I stagger a little bit more.

I can hear people in the background, “Oooh, she should have gone left there,” or “Hasn’t she realized life telegraphs those right hooks?” But those things are harder to see when there’s blood in your eyes. It’s hard to process when your ears are ringing and the noise surrounding you is so deafening.

Sometimes it feels like I call out to God, “You are bigger than life! Why won’t you stand for me? Do something!” I probably send out this particular SOS more than I care to admit, actually. The response varies. Often, it feels like God just claps me on the back, gives me a quick drink of water and responds, “Nah, you’ve got this, champ. It’s good for you,” before shoving me back in the fight. Sometimes He’s silent. I look around the crowd and I can’t see His face.

But sometimes, He gets in a clean right hook that causes life to stagger back and give me a breath. Blake not only surviving his accident but thriving in the face of it is one of those moments. And so the times when I can’t even see God’s face in the crowd, when I can’t hear His voice, I cling to the memory of the when He clobbered life for me. And until He steps in to do so again, I keep getting up—however slowly—and I’ll keep staggering around the makeshift ring, trying to win this fight against life. And to think, there was a time when life and I were friends.

Not too long ago, I was on the phone listening to a friend talk about a struggle she’s having. Something about that conversation brought to mind the book of James, Chapter 1. I’ve always scoffed at the notion of rejoicing in trials and tribulations. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful; I just wasn’t sure patience and perseverance were worth the cost. But in that moment, I knew God has used the past 6 years, 10 years, 20 years to change me.  He’s used these trials to change my children. He’s made us stronger, calmer, and kinder.

In many ways, I feel like I’ve been in a chrysalis. And now it’s time to break free from that cocoon of suffering to be the creature God has been molding me to be.

Mine and Adam’s marriage has never been a stable one. The things I write about in my books, they aren’t part of my own story. Sure, there were aspects of me in each book, but the love story that provided the heartbeat of my novels, it wasn’t mine.

Still, we both fought to save it, to make it work. Usually not at the same time and rarely in effective ways, but we tried. But in late 2008/early 2009, the marriage died, replaced by an arrangement that would spare our children having to shuttle between houses at a young age. Adam made it clear he wanted to someday have more. I made it clear I didn’t know if I’d ever get there. I won’t go into the reasons why—that’s between me, God, and Adam.

I’d agreed to stay, to see if time would heal wounds because our kids had been through so much already. And then the accident happened. And then the past six years happened. The days blended one into the next and somehow I forgot there could be anything different. It took longer and longer to write a book. I blamed my schedule, but the truth was that I was deeply depressed. I’d given up on love, on life. I was existing for the sake of my children and silently wishing I would die because then I’d be free.

It was a silly Facebook game that woke me up. It was probably click bait, but I fell for it. I clicked and took a picture of my resting face to see if I have what’s known as Resting Bitch Face. The app then analyzes the emotions your face gives off at rest. My face, without the smile to hide behind, shouted sadness. Like, off the charts.
We tried the app with each of my kids’ faces. Blake was neutral-to-happy. Dylan and Chris both showed underlying anger—a lot of it.

They took their dad’s picture. According to the app, his face oozed contempt. I’d put less stock in the results if my kids hadn’t unanimously said of all of the results, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

It was like a slap in the face, or a bucket of cold water over the head. That’s when I decided it was time to come out of the cocoon. It was time to change my life so that I could once again live my life, so my children could live their lives—because whatever I'd told myself, the world I'd created for them was not one of stability. It's not a healthy dynamic being modeled for them.

When I told the kids about the divorce, they barely blinked. On some level, they seemed almost relieved. Maybe it’s because Adam has operated separate from us for so long—he spends most of his time gone or in his room. But I suspect it has as much to do with the tension that hangs in the air of our home, permeable and ever-present.

The months since the decision was made have been have been some of the most stressful of my life. We switched cars since mine was in his name and his was in my name. The Blazer promptly died, leaving me car-less. Finding a place to rent has been a nightmare—there aren’t many rentals when houses can easily be sold. We owed taxes again this year. I had a farm full of animals to find good homes for… the list goes on. And on. And on.

But these weeks have also been, in many ways, some of the best times I’ve had in a very long time. Once the decision was made, something changed with my boys and I. Something lifted. Excitement settled over us in its place.

For the first time in a very long while, I have things I look forward to each day. The stressful stuff is easier if you’re fighting for something beyond mere survival, when there is joy and laughter woven throughout each day.

We finally gave up on finding a rental and bought a small house in town. Lord willing, everything will come together and we’ll close in 10 short days. It feels like 10 excruciatingly long days. People have commented that I don’t seem excited; I’ll be excited when the papers are signed and I have keys in hand. Until, then, I’m trying not to fret, to trust that God’s got this. Every now and then the excitement bubbles up, but I’m still afraid the rug will be pulled out from under me again. I hate admitting that my faith is so weak, but God already knows, so there you go.

The nice thing about buying a house is that I can take all three pet dogs with me. I’d been worried sick about having to leave someone behind. As for my horses, they’re going to be boarded. An intelligent person would sell them, but we’ve already discussed that that doesn’t apply here. I can’t bear to do it. It’ll be hard enough only getting to visit them when I can get my hands on a car, to not be able to walk out into a field and hug Daisy’s neck whenever I feel like it.

Yeah, I still haven’t solved the car pickle. Until we get over the expense of moving, it’s not in the budget. I tell myself that living in town means I can walk wherever I need to go and I’ll lose all the weight I’ve packed on over the past few years. I already have a 25 pound head start—that’s another change I made this year. I’ve begun the slow journey back to physical health as well as mental.

The one thing that has hit me, hard, during this process is how blessed I am by the people in my life. I am realizing that those roots I’ve longed for had already begun to grow in this little town I’ve come to love. But it’s not just here, friends from all over have stepped up in support of me and my boys. I feel completely and totally wrapped in the love of those friends, and that’s not a bad place to be.

To be continued...

My Own Ever After: Chapter Ten

The end of a dream Prologue (If you need to catch up) ​By late 2015, my family was completely immersed in my publisher, Booktrope. In 2012, when they’d needed someone with project management experience, I’d recommended Adam. They’d hired him, and his role had increasingly grown with the company until he was VP of Production. Granted, it was a startup, so they handed out titles when they couldn’t hand out appropriate pay, but he was pretty much living and breathing that company.

I’d been one of their first authors. Then I took on marketing others’ books. Then I became a book marketing mentor. Then, when they decided to create imprints for their more specialized books, I took the helm of Vox Dei, the Christian division. I later took over their middle grade and parenting divisions, but Vox Dei was always my baby.

Over the course of 2015, with the help of Becki Brannen (an author who has, over the course of the years, become one of my dearest friends), we built something unlike anything I’d ever been part of before.
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From a practical standpoint, taking over Vox Dei was stupid. My family was still broke; we still had a mountain of debt. My own book sales were languishing because Booktrope had never quite figured out their book management program (that was supposed to provide each author with marketing support). Sure, I knew book marketing, but I needed someone to help with my own novels. I’m a firm believer that every book, in order to succeed needs both an author who is willing to hustle and at least one other person in their corner. It’s not a solo effort. It’s really more of a team effort. I didn’t have that team. By taking over Vox Dei, I effectively closed the door on my own book babies. I didn’t realize it at the time. At the time, I thought I could handle both. At the time, I thought the small percentage of book sales I was being offered in form of payment would mean something for my family. As it turned out, I couldn’t handle both and the pay was never even a drop in the bucket for us—far less than I could have been earning back in corporate life. (Or working fast food, to be honest.) Now that I know, I can’t say I would have chosen differently. What we did that year was that special.

The book industry is struggling right now, and the game plan adopted by big publishers (both the big five and established Christian publishers) is to go with the surest possible bets, names they’re reasonably certain they can sell. With Christian publishers, there is an added layer—The Christian Booksellers Association (CBA). They have a set of strict standards that assure bookstores the titles are, in fact, Christian and adhere to Christian values.

While I applaud the intent, I’ve always felt that everyone was trying so hard to play it safe the end product was impacted. So many Christian books wind up looking like a plastic replica of life because they can’t ring true while still adhering to the standards set out by the CBA. Because of this, I was okay with the fact that Booktrope wouldn’t even consider joining it. I wanted to create Christian books for a messy world. Books that honored God while still meeting people where they were.

And boy, did we have some amazing books. Books that moved me, changed me, challenged me to be a better person. Books that reached out to the hurting and the broken, helping them find their way to healing. Books that engaged young Christian readers in a way they’d never been before.

We made good books, and we had an amazing team. We prayed for each other. We supported each other. We became involved in each other’s worlds. We were a family.
Becki and I faced too many challenges to name that year: turnover in the book management program, hiccups in the production line, and the ever-present push to publish more books faster. I look back now and am amazed at what we accomplished together.

By the time 2015 was in its home stretch, I was realizing that my life had been completely absorbed by Vox Dei. I was working from 6 am until 10 or 11 pm with barely a bathroom break. My kids’ homeschooling was turning into a disaster, salvaged only by the fact that I have amazing kids who helped each other and me. But with all of those hours put in, we still weren’t selling books. We couldn’t overcome the hurdle of not being in the CBA. We couldn’t crack the Amazon code.

I had some thoughts there, about what we could do, but I didn’t have the budget to test it. Booktrope had a pretty set formula of what they expected from book managers, of how they saw book marketing playing out. I’m not going to say if it was good or bad, only that it wasn’t complete.

In November of 2015, Booktrope hired me to do some competitive intelligence analysis for them. What were our competitors doing? What were other authors doing? How could we better sell books?

That analysis raised so many red flags for me, confirmed so many of the things I’d been feeling in my gut. Everything in the industry indicated that to survive in the publishing world, you either had to be a highly-diversified giant who could throw lots of money at your titles or a highly-targeted niche publisher who was deeply involved in each book you put out the door.

Booktrope was neither. We were churning books out at a record pace without any plan to sell those books. It was a recipe for disaster. I couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to grow a division that I now knew would never get the budget it needed to succeed. And without an ad or marketing budget, there was only so much I could do.
I also knew that my family was in a state of financial ruin without me actually using my degree to earn a living. Adam didn’t see things my way. He was sure Booktrope would pull through. I, however, was absolutely certain it was no longer safe for us to have all of our eggs in the Booktrope basket. Perhaps it never was, but now my eyes were opened to it.

So I made the heart-wrenching decision to turn in my notice at Vox Dei and return to the corporate world. I had been reminded of my contract and that I couldn’t give explanation as to why I was leaving, even now, there is so much left unsaid. Still, navigating that departure was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Trying to do right by my team and my family was a slippery slope.

I applied for a job in the marketing department at Incredible Pizza, a family entertainment center based out of Springfield. The pay was about half what I was looking for, but something in me kept coming back to it. There were other jobs I could apply to, other jobs pursuing me, but my gut told me it was the right one. And while the pay wasn’t a lot, it was more than I’d been making at Vox Dei, so I applied. When I met the man I would be reporting to, I was even more certain that was where God was leading me. Tim, the VP of Marketing, and I had an instant rapport and I could see myself working well with him. Of all the times I’ve been wrong in my life, this was not one of them. I can still say Tim is a good human being who cares for his employees—and they’d walk through fire for him.

I took the job at Incredible Pizza, much to my children’s delight. For those who have never been to or heard of America’s Incredible Pizza, let me pause to explain. The front of the house is a full buffet, not just pizza. The back is an entire indoor fairground. Yes, fairground. Video and prize games are just the tip of the iceberg. They also have (depending on the store) laser tag, go karts, bumper cars, a tilt-a-whirl, a roller coaster, mini bowling, mini golf, a trampoline park… it’s insane. It’s incredibly fun. And it was now a part of their world.

Knowing how excited they were made it easier. I was proud to finally be doing something that delighted them. The past few years had been so hard for them; it warmed my heart to be able to bring my children such joy. Still, there were days I cried the whole way into work. I missed my kids. I missed Vox Dei. I missed my farm and my animals. Being in a cubicle for 8 hours a day felt like being in a cage. And since I was THE social media department for a company that was busiest on evenings and weekends, I was tied to my work phone or a laptop all evening and every weekend, too.

Somehow, I’d landed myself in yet another position where I was working seven days a week and not making much money. I have a knack for that.

I was in Tulsa for my first Incredible Pizza store visit when the announcement came down that Booktrope would be closing its doors. I’d found out a few days before but had been instructed not to say anything. Even though I’d had a couple of days to mentally prepare, the official announcement was a huge blow. I had indie-published my most recent novel, but I still had eleven books that were now going to be pulled out of publication. What little revenue I was still getting from them—and five years of work building them up—would be erased. I had two divisions full of people looking to me to help them understand and navigate the implications for their books. And my husband was losing his job.

I cried a lot that weekend. I felt bad, like I probably wasn’t making the best impression on the Tulsa Incredible Pizza, but I took lots of breaks back to my hotel room to cry, then I’d pull myself back together and walk back to the store, where I was surrounded by laughing, happy people. The disconnect was surreal.

So many of my hopes and dreams had been placed in Booktrope. Even though I had seen it coming and had jumped ship months before, I still mourned the loss. Deeply.
Adam was determined to go down with the ship. He was more actively involved right up until the bitter end than even the c-suite. I know it was the right thing to do for the authors who were panicked, struggling to get things in order before their books disappeared. But for our family, it was catastrophic. He was so immersed in the sinking Booktrope ship that he didn’t have time to look for a new job.

Booktrope closed in April. It would be September before Adam found a job to replace it. In so many ways, it’s the perfect job for him. He’s now helping the homeless in Springfield and surrounding counties. The pay is a little over half what he’d been making at Booktrope. On the one hand, he’s helping others and he is fulfilled. On the other, raising a family is expensive and I think there’s a tendency to get so wrapped up in saving the world that he downplays the needs of his own family, he forgets how much his own children have given at the altar of our dreams.

Dylan, our oldest, never does things the normal way. He is so like me in that regard. He had no desire to return to public school, ever. In fact, he once told me he had nightmares that I’d make him go back. I remembered having those same nightmares, so I helped him finish his high school diploma sooner rather than later. He’d been testing at Master’s level work as a seventh grader. Finishing a high school curriculum in three years instead of four wasn’t tough for him. For his final semester, he enrolled in a local community college to take a few classes there while he dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s on his homeschool education.

I re-enrolled my other two boys in public school in Fall of 2016. They aren’t like Dylan in that regard. He would have suffocated had I made him go back and do things the normal way. They, however, are thriving. I love their school and their teachers. I love that my kids are making friends. And I love not being wholly responsible for their education. There was a joy in homeschooling, but there was a serious weight to it as well. I appreciate the teachers who accept that weight not only for my children, but for every other child in the school.

While I stopped mourning Booktrope, there were times when I questioned if I’d heard God right about Incredible Pizza. It was an intense job, to say the least. I was solely responsible for all six Facebook pages with about 180,000 fans between them, both producing content and responding to every single customer comment and complaint. Then there was the rest of the social plan, Twitter, Instagram, etc. In addition, I was responsible for finding, arranging, and often working the community events for each store. With six stores involved in six to 10 events per store per year, that added up. And there is a lot about the business that makes working there a unique challenge and, well, intense.
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There are so many things about Incredible Pizza that I love—the team and being part of something that makes kids smile are at the top of that list. But the pressure was unbelievable. I hadn’t had a day off since February. By November of 2016, I had gained even more weight, I was losing my hair from stress, and I was having chest pains. It was the chest pains that got my attention. I knew something had to change.

To be continued...

My Own Ever After: Chapter Nine

Hell is a very cold place Prologue As I write this, I’m sick yet again. I’ve had some sort of respiratory illness pretty much since November, and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s my house—the mold, the dust, the mice. This is one of those houses that no matter how much I clean, it’s never clean. No matter how much I battle the mice, they find another hole. We never intended to stay in a tiny, outdated house. The plan had always been to update, to add on. Life has a way of laughing at plans, though. As I think about where to start with this particular chapter, it’s a needed reminder to be thankful, and there was a time I was very thankful for this house. November of 2013, my family embarked on what would be our most difficult adventure yet. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we had purchased our land and cabin just in time for what would be the harshest winter in anyone’s memory.

The cabin was just 325 square feet with one room and two lofts. We didn’t have running water. I built us an outhouse with a composting toilet and a makeshift sink. Adam took one of the lofts for his bedroom and office. The boys took the other loft for their bedroom. I resumed my usual spot on the couch. We had a wood stove in the center of our room. I turned one corner of the cabin into my “kitchen.”

The setup was as close to a Little House on the Prairie kind of gig as I ever want to come, and it gave me a whole new appreciation for the women who settled this vast country of ours. It was not an easy life by any stretch.

As odd as it seems, the boys and I were all excited about this new adventure at the outset. After 18 months of being buffeted about by the whims of others, this was something we felt we could control. This was our chance to own something, to sink down some roots. The plan was to hunker down for the winter and break ground on a cob house in the spring. (In fact, I have an entire Pinterest board to attest to that plan.)

The week we moved into our cabin began the most brutal of winters. Arctic winds howled seemingly non-stop. It snowed, it snowed again, and then it snowed some more. My boys got really good at splitting wood. Our little stove was so tiny that it only burned for two hours at a time, so Dylan and I slept in shifts to keep it stoked, lest it go out overnight and the family freeze to death. Even so, there were mornings the water jugs at the far corners of the cabin would freeze through.

On the coldest of days, there was little more we could do than pile up in blanket igloos on the couch to watch TV. We watched a lot of Netflix that winter. We watched so much Psych that to this day, whenever I hear the theme song, I’m transported back to that cold little cabin.

We lost several animals that year, despite having barns and plenty of bedding. The oldest alpaca, two of our baby goats from kidding season (which started in January for us), and a bottle baby goat named Anna that we’d taken in. Anna was the hardest. I adored that little goat and the way she’d dance when she saw me. We never knew what happened to her; we just came home one day to find her dead.

One night in December, I agreed for Dylan’s friend Zach to come spend the night with us. Zach’s parents had a party to go to and they didn’t feel comfortable leaving their teenage son to his own devices. I was reluctant to have company because I was so embarrassed for their friends to see how tiny our home was, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. As it turned out, Zach wasn’t alone. He’d brought another of their friends, Noah, with him. Those goofy boys got to horsing around in the loft and you could feel the entire cabin rock. When I smelled burning rubber, I looked around for the source, only to discover that Noah had thrown a pair of Dylan’s shorts onto the wood stove. I snatched them off the stove and threw the smoldering britches outside, but my house smelled like burnt shorts for pretty much the rest of the winter.

Noah was an enigma. Sometimes he was a total punk. Sometimes he was as loveable as an overgrown pup. Sometimes you’d catch a glimpse at the pain he carried inside and it would tear your heart right in two. I don’t think anyone really understood how much Noah carried around inside; he took his own life in February 2015. The story of the burning shorts was one of the stories the pastor told at his funeral. That funeral was one of the hardest I’ve ever gone to. There was a group of us football moms who huddled together, all with the same look on our face. That look was a mixture of our hearts breaking for our own boys as they dealt with the loss of their friend and the question none of us wanted to ask: Could I have done more?

Noah taught us a lot of things, most of which is not my story to tell, but first and foremost he taught me that the things that can seem so insignificant to us can be the world to someone else. You never really know what kind of impact you have on someone else’s life.

There were times in that little cabin that we thought the winter would never end. By February, I was in a pretty dark place. I was severely depressed and felt completely and utterly trapped in my marriage and in the constant poverty that seemed to be tightening its grip on us ever since Blake’s accident. But I continued to put one foot in front of the other, if for no other reason than my boys needed me.

If there was anything that got me through besides my boys and my faith, it was hearing from an old friend from Scottrade. Kate had written a book and wondered if I’d be willing to read it and give her feedback. Not only was the book amazing, it was heart-wrenching (I went through an entire box of Kleenex). And it reminded me that our lives are never as insignificant as they can sometimes seem. In many ways, that book saved my life. ( Saving Jason by Kate Anslinger, btw. It’s worth reading.)

Ironically, the time of my deepest depression was also when I was writing Waiting for You , one of my happiest books. There were things that were good about our “Derksen Days.” We learned a lot. We drew even closer to God and each other. I lost all of the weight I’d put on after Blake’s accident. (Hey, I’ll take a win where I can get it.)

Thankfully spring did come, eventually. And with the lengthening days and sunshine, my mood improved. I only let life keep me down for so long before I look around to figure out what I have to change to make things better for us. The instant the ground began to thaw, I knew the first order of business was to build us a home. I’d spent my winter studying up on cob building and was dying to give it a try. We started with a cob chicken coop, which was absurdly fun. After a couple of days, we really had the hang of creating just the right mix of sand and clay and water to create our building material. For a week, I utterly enjoyed the hard labor of hauling materials and the feel of the cob under my fingers. I envisioned all the lovely things I would make out of cob.

We had the trench dug for the house’s foundation and we set a date for a “cob party”—we knew we’d need more hands on deck if we’d ever get our home built. Our friends and family showed up and worked hard all day. It was fun, it was exhausting—our bodies ached from it—and at the end of the day, we had absolutely no discernable progress to show for our efforts. It was right about then that I began to rethink my cob house. In fact, that’s when it began to occur to me that a person who’s biggest building accomplishments to date were a chicken shanty and goat houses probably shouldn’t be building their own home from scratch.

As I re-thought my strategy, we began to spend quite a bit of time at the coffee shop in town. They had tasty drinks, wi-fi, and it felt good to be in a normal building. Adam really liked the shop’s owner, who also happened to be the mayor at the time. I always got the impression that she was nice to me because I was a customer but we wouldn’t be friends if we met on the street. She was nice, though, and she let me put a couple of my books in her shop. She was also pretty with a lovely singing voice.

I remember one particular day—by that time I’d taken a job doing some book marketing at Booktrope in addition to my own book stuff—anyway, I was sitting at the shop working when a man came by the shop to practice a duet with Kristy. He was cute, they made a pretty pair sitting there singing, but the thing that struck me was how obscenely talented he was. He could play a guitar like I’d never heard before, and his voice was both soothing and gripping at once. That was the first I learned that Buffalo has its very own rising star in Lyal Strickland. Once Adam told me the name, I realized I’d heard a couple of his songs on Adam and the boys’ playlists.

I didn’t think much else of it after that day, but man, I was jealous of her in that moment. If I could have been anything besides a writer, it would have been a musician. There are times I toy with the idea of learning guitar and singing in coffee shops and wine houses for the sheer joy of it someday, when my kids are grown. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get over my fear of singing publicly to accomplish that one.

Spring was in full force by then and I was no closer to solving my housing issue. We couldn’t stay in the cabin much longer without losing our minds, but I had no real clue what to do about it. And then, our neighbor put her tiny little house on the market. The house sat on about an acre, completely ensconced by our property because the two had once been one. Buying the house seemed like the perfect solution to our problem. If nothing else, it had running water. Hauling animal water from the creek had lost its appeal months before—more than once, I’d get the water to the top of the hill, only for something to send the bucket rolling back down, emptying its contents.

There were a couple of problems with that plan, though. Namely that I had a short sale on my credit, a mountain of medical bills, and no money for a down payment. And that’s when the same deacon we’d bought our land from stepped in and bought the property solely for the purpose of reselling it to us, owner financed. It’s been three years, and I am still at a loss for words to explain my gratitude to that man and his wife for what they did.

We now had an end in sight, indoor plumbing was tantalizingly close. The only problem was the closing date got shuffled a few times after we’d packed up the cabin and told the company we’d rented it from they could come get it. Money was tight and we couldn’t afford both. And that, my friends, was the birth of gypsy camp. For a few weeks in May, my family literally camped on our own land while we waited for the house to close. We called it gypsy camp and did our very best to make it an adventure. And most days, it really could have been worse. Storms sucked.

But then, the house closed and we moved in and began to feel like normal human beings again. (If you’re counting, this makes the fourth address we’ve had on the same street.) We had running water and a propane heater. At first, 725 square feet felt huge. Adam got a room/office. Blake and Chris shared the second room. Dylan turned a shed into his own room, and I resumed my spot on the couch. But, whether it was due to our kids getting huge or just the newness to wearing off, it didn’t take long for the house to start feeling cramped.

Things break faster than I can fix them. We’re right on top of the dirt road and the house has terrible seals, so it’s ALWAYS dusty, even five minutes after you dust. The internet is awful. The house next door (that sat vacant for a decade) got a tenant who, quite honestly, scares me. I could go on—there are about a million things about this house that drive me crazy or I wish were different.

But then there are the flowers. I mark my year by the rhythm of the flowers and the trees. I adore our creek and our orchard. Everywhere I look, there is something about this land that I love. I wish things were different, that I wasn’t so alone in tending the farm, that I had more money, more time, no creepy neighbor… but however discontent I may be at times, I am thankful for this little house, down to the very core of my being. I know things could be so much worse.

It’s been three years since we moved into our home. And we have had so many happy memories here. We have dear, dear friends on this little road—good, hard-working people who have been there for us in good times and bad. Our horses, Dixie and Casper came back to us. Sadly, we lost Casper to cancer. I still remember my youngest son, curled up with that horse out in the field. He didn’t leave his side until the end.

I got my darling Daisy in this house—she’s an appaloosa filly who has become the horse of my dreams. We got her when she was six months old from the same breeder we’d bought Dixie from. The first few months we had her, she was kind of a brat and I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. But I kept working with her and then one day, we just started clicking. She’s two now and I’ve never had a horse I trust more. We have a bond I can’t explain, the kind I’ve always dreamed of having.

We still visit Jack on occasion; it was important to the boys and me to keep that friendship going. On one of our visits, he offered to let us breed Dixie to his stallion, who had been moved to a nearby university. I was beyond excited to take him up on the offer, knowing the foal that pairing produced would be far better than anything I could ever afford. (Though, in truth, Daisy is an amazing horse worth far more than I paid.)

I felt awful for agreeing to the breeding when poor Dixie was so miserable during the process. But the breeding took, and I will never forget what it felt like to watch the baby’s heart flutter on an ultrasound. I cried. I think I was as emotional as I had been watching my own ultrasounds. The year between that ultrasound and foaling seemed to drag on forever. Dixie ran past her due date. Jack lost one of his foals to fescue poisoning, which made me worry all the more about Dixie and her baby. I was terrified I’d do something wrong and mess it up.

And then came the morning that I went to check on Dixie and there was a little red filly learning to walk at her side. She had a huge blaze of white that rambled awkwardly down her face. I don’t know how long I stood there watching the pair, crying like a fool, before going to get the boys.

Pip eventually grew into the white blaze and her color deepened to a dark bay, just like her daddy. She’s a phenomenal horse. Watching her grow, being part of her start in life, has been one of the greatest joys of my life. Of all the things I love about my farm, I love the way we have it set up the most—the land wraps around the yard in a way that means I’m always close to my horses. I can always look out a window and see them. And when life gets too rough, I go out and hug their necks and drink in the smell of them. Pip and Daisy are the horses I waited my whole life for, and it was worth the wait.

I want so badly to end the chapter there. It feels happy and complete, but there is one other event I feel the need to work in. It was the October after we moved into the house, and I was walking across my parents’ lawn when I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle. I could hear it tear and the pain was immediate. It just so happened that on that particular night, my sister’s friend was also there. She was a nurse and I knew she’d take one look at my ankle and insist that I get it treated, which I had no intention of doing. (We have a high deductible health plan, and I know I've mentioned the crushing medical debt before.)

When I was 15, I tore all of the ligaments in my left ankle and knee doing step aerobics in gym class. (Ironically, my middle name means “full of grace.”) Anyway, that little slip saddled me with years of physical therapy and surgeries. At one point, my orthopedic surgeon told me that I had arthritis so bad in my left foot that by the time I was 40, I could very likely be in a wheelchair. Off and on through the years, my foot will flare up or I’ll re-sprain it. When that happens, I baby it, do my PT exercises, and move on.

But on this night, as I sat staring at my enormously swollen foot that was an ugly shade of purple, I suspected I’d need to more than baby it. Somehow, I got through the night without having to go to the hospital, even though I couldn’t bear any weight at all on the foot. When we got home, I wrapped and iced it and we pulled my crutches out of storage.

I kept telling myself it would heal soon. “Soon” turned out to be more than 8 weeks before I could even get off the couch without it instantly puffing up and turning purple again. It had to be elevated ALL THE TIME. Try running a farm, keeping up with three kids, cooking from scratch and not having a dishwasher with a foot that has to be elevated ALL THE FREAKING TIME. All of the from-scratch cooking that had become part of our routine went by the wayside during that time. We fell back in the habit of eating easy but unhealthy packaged meals since I was no longer able to cook.

The foot did eventually heal, though it was probably a year before it stopped hurting and I have only now, more than two years later, started wearing cute shoes occasionally instead of the support shoes that I’ve needed to walk without pain for so long.

Two things happened as a result of that fateful night: the farm went downhill, fast, and I’ve never been able to fully reclaim the ground I lost. The other is that by switching back to processed foods and my activity level plummeting, I packed on 70 pounds over the course of two years. I’m sure my age has something to do with that, too, but that’s a rather touchy subject this year.

Here’s the thing about gaining weight, and it’s also true of getting older: you might not recognize the person in the mirror anymore, but you’re still the same you on the inside. It’s frustrating when the rest of the world doesn’t recognize that.

When I asked Dylan to proof this installment for me, he commented "a lot happened then, didn't it?" He's right. I mean, I didn't even get into the mountain lion attack. As we talked, we realized we haven't had much of a breath since March 31, 2011. No wonder the boys and I are all feeling so worn down.

But for every hardship, there's an Uno game that left us laughing so hard our sides hurt. For every time life has thrown us a curve ball, there is a friend who unexpectedly cooked dinner or checked in on us "just because." This life may not be easy, but it is full and we are thankful.

To be continued...

My Own Ever After: Chapter Eight

Just a couple of moves Prologue ​May 2013 through May 2014 was… well, I don’t really know how to describe it. An adventure? A blur? Absolute insanity?

As much as I adored my little gray house, it had its quirks. We’d leased it with the intention of buying it once we’d financially recovered from the accident, but enough had gone wrong during our first year to give us pause. And then, it happened. I don’t remember where the leak started, but there must have been water somewhere there shouldn’t have been because I called our landlord. He came out a couple of days later to try to help find the source of the leak. He, honest to goodness, tried to find the source of the leak with a dowsing rod. When he couldn’t, he asked me to try. I remember feeling bad for him as I noticed his hands trembling. He suspected what I did, I’m sure—the problem was not a small one.

When our landlord finally admitted he couldn’t find the leak, he called in someone to do the work. Eventually, a trench was dug in the yard to get to the pipes. As it turned out, whomever built the house had put it on a concrete slab instead of a foundation, and the drought the year before had caused the slab to shift, knocking pipes loose. Getting to the pipes was a time consuming and costly endeavor. Our leak was eventually fixed, but I’d made my mind up that I would not be buying the little gray house when the time came.

Apparently, about the time I was realizing I did not want to inherit the costly repairs I knew the house would need, our landlord’s wife was deciding she wanted out from under the house that had just cost them a small fortune.

It was my neighbor who broke the news. She lived in a matching house across the field from ours, owned by the same person. She flagged me down one morning to ask if I’d heard the news that our landlords wanted to sell both properties. She was upset and already fretting over where they would go. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was reeling nonetheless. No, I didn’t want to buy the gray house, but I didn’t want to leave it, either. I loved the lay of the land, my pond, my flowers, and my creek. We’d worked like dogs to finish fencing it. I loved that stinking house.

After I excused myself, I remember walking down to my favorite field and just sobbing. I mean heart-wrenching, belly-hurting, ugly cry. For the second time in a year, I was losing my home. Only now I had horses and goats and ducks and chickens in the mix. I’d told two separate friends I could take in their alpacas. (Before the accident, I’d been seriously alpaca shopping. When the accident happened, that dream died. Then the alpaca market crashed and I inherited a few.)

I’d pulled myself together by the time the landlord’s wife called me to give me the news herself. Not only did she want me to buy the house, but for almost double what I knew it was worth. We were already paying more in rent than any other house in the area. And still she was genuinely surprised when I declined the offer.

After a bit of scrambling and with some help from friends, we found a place to rent—right across the street. The driveway was so long and windy, we’d lived in the gray house for months before we’d even realized there was something back there. It was a small trailer with more land but less pasture. The entire property needed a lot, and I mean a lot, of cleaning and love. But we could keep our animals and the boys could stay close to their friends, so we agreed to a month-to-month rental. About the time the deal was made, our landlord had called in a panic to tell us we didn’t need to move; they were willing to keep renting. I decided to pass, rather than risk the same conversation the next time our lease was due to renew. It’s been four years and they’re on their fourth tenant. So, yeah, we’d have been having an annual conversation.

Our new home wasn’t the farm I dreamed of—though it was better after I got rid of the raccoon who’d taken up residence while it sat empty—but the woods were lovely and there was much about the property I loved.

When we were in the gray house, we’d become good friends with the neighbors who had kiddos the same age as our younger boys. We’d even taken down a stretch of the fence between us so our horses and their steer could graze both properties at will. When we moved, the horses kept breaking out of their new, shabby pasture to go graze at the neighbor’s. Eventually, we just offered the horses to them with the caveat that they let us know if they ever wanted rid of them.

There were good memories to be had in our new home. I think I’ve worked harder there than I ever have in my life—it was a round-the-clock effort, cleaning up the property, building fences, and cleaning the home and outbuildings. As hard as I worked and as much loss as we suffered there, I still look back on it fondly. I took what I’d been given and made a home and found contentment.

That summer, my parents made the move from St. Louis to their own little patch of land in the Springfield area. Their new home was about an hour further south of us. It was gorgeous; I had to admit that I struggled not to be even the teensiest bit jealous. I don’t think the kids or I are particularly materialistic, but sometimes we do wish for the things other people take for granted. Still, they are things. We’ve lost everything more than once and still we walk on. As long as we have each other and we have God, it’s all good. But, back to my parents… The boys and I met my sisters and their kids in St. Louis to help them move. My mom has a lot of stuff; it was an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing.

One of the things she had was two wrought-iron end pieces for a bench. I don’t know where the rest of the bench was. I imagine the wood had rotted out at some point and she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of the iron, so it was left leaning against the wall outside. Somehow, I managed to knock those pieces of iron over as I fought to back a recliner out the door. They landed on my right shin. The pain was immediate and it was intense.

I didn’t want to hinder the move with a trip to urgent care, so I told everyone I’d be fine with a pack of ice. I was fairly useless the rest of the day. It hurts even now, just thinking about it. Crushing medical debt has defined most of my adult years, so I tend to avoid going to the doctor unless I absolutely have to go. You’d be surprised what you can heal with a bit of tea tree oil mixed in coconut oil. What that doesn’t fix, peppermint oil usually can.

But this, this was beyond the scope of my tea tree oil. Still, I hobbled around for a very long time, telling myself it would eventually get better. It wasn’t until the lymph nodes in my legs started swelling and the pain got to be too much to grit my teeth and bear that I finally caved and went to the walk-in clinic. They referred me to the ER because they suspected a blood clot had formed. The ER made me wait around for about a million years, talked to me like I was an idiot for coming in the first place, released me after giving me no help whatsoever, and sent me a $3,000 bill for the pleasure. More crushing medical debt.

So I lived with it. Whatever I’d done to my leg that day, it took over a year for it to stop hurting and two years for the bruise to heal. You can still see the dent leg if you look closely. I have a talent for injuring myself.

Football season rolled around, and I have to admit I was excited about Dylan’s 8th grade year. I enjoyed feeding the team before games and yelling myself hoarse at the game. We didn’t win much, but Dylan was a beast on the field and I was proud of him. Although I was starting to worry about him. He was exhausted all of the time, between football and homework. I was getting frustrated because he’d spend much of his day tutoring other kids and then he’d be up until midnight on his own homework after practice. We live so far out that the bus arrived at 6:30 in the morning to pick them up.

Perhaps it was being tired, but he seemed to get injured more from the onset of the season.  And then came the game when he stretched out to make an amazing tackle that had everyone on their feet cheering. He held his arm funny afterward, but insisted on staying in the game. After the game, he mentioned his arm was still hurting from the tackle. I fretted over him for the next couple of days, and he assured me he was fine. By the end of practice the second day, he admitted his arm was still really hurting so I took him to the doctor. His “hurt” arm was broken. Dylan inherited my talent for injuring himself.

The broken arm ended his football season. If he’d been struggling before, he really was with his dominant hand injured. My child who had tested well past grade level heading into seventh grade—at Masters level in some subjects—was growing ever-more unhappy in school. After many conversations and much deliberation, he and I decided home school would be the better option for him.

The next upheaval came at the end of October, when our landlord decided not to rent to us any longer. Turns out she goes through more tenants that the first landlord did. That revolving door ended when one of her tenants got so angry at her that he burned the place to the ground. Apparently I have a knack for picking landlords, too.

Regardless, we were rapidly heading into winter and we were once again homeless with a farm full of animals in tow.

I can’t exactly say what thought process led to my next decision, but I was tired of being ousted from my home on the whim of another. I also had no desire (or ability) to be beholden to a bank for my home, either.

It just so happened that the piece of property adjoining ours was breathtakingly beautiful and happened to be owned by one of our church deacons. It wasn’t improved (read: no well, electric, or septic) but I had in my head that it was better to have a piece of land that nobody could take from me, even if it meant I had to build my home with my own two hands.

We made arrangements to buy this little piece of land and I got us one of the ready-built cabins that are increasingly popular in this neck of the woods. I still remember our deacon’s wife looking me in the eye. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Positive. I can see my children playing in that field. I want to make this our home.”

“Okay then.”

She knew how hard it would be to carve a home out of nothing. All I knew was that when we’d heard we had to move yet again, I’d been ready to give up. I’d asked my boys what they wanted to do. Did they want to pack up and move to the beach? Head west? I was game for pretty much anything since it felt like the universe did not want me here.

But my kids wanted to be here. They chose, hands down, to stay. What’s more, they wanted to stay on their farm. So we bought the land and tried desperately to get moved in before winter set in. We didn’t quite make it.

To be continued...

My Own Ever After: Chapter Seven

A new world Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six ​Shortly after Blake got out of the hospital, once the decision had been made for me to stay home with our son until he was out of rehab, I called our mortgage company. After being passed around half a dozen times and sitting on hold for a couple of hours, I got a real live human being willing to talk to me on the line and I explained our situation.

“Are you currently behind?”

“No, but our payments have doubled in three years. We’re barely scraping by; I know we can’t make the payments for long on one income. I just want to know if there is anything at all we can work out.”

“Sorry. If you’re not behind, we can’t talk to you. Wait until you miss your first payment and then call back; we can work with you then. There are programs in place.” Now, an intelligent person would have hung up the phone and called a real estate agent to put the house on the market then and there, while our credit was good and we weren’t behind. But, in my defense, I was a skosh overwhelmed and not making the most reasoned choices. At that time, taking care of my children took every available brain cell. I made a stupid choice, and I will pay dearly for it for a long time to come.

Fast forward a year, it went by in a blink, and I call the mortgage company when we are now behind on our payments, only to be told they wouldn’t work with us and would be foreclosing. An acquaintance from church caught wind of it and told us in no uncertain terms that the only godly thing to do would be to do a short sale on the house so we could at least come to a compromise with the mortgage company. It just so happened she worked at an agency that handled short sales and she’d be happy to help us out.

Side note: something we didn’t realize at the time was that while the mortgage company would get the money from the sale of the house and the government bailout money, and FHA, the amount of the loan forgiven would be credited as income against us. I recall them mentioning tax implications but my brain did not process what exactly they would be. We would later be hit with a tax bill that was over 50% of our actual annual income. Yeah, that one still hurts each month as we make the payment.

Going from the information he had at the time, Adam was strongly in the short sale camp, so the appointment was made. I remember being absolutely mortified when her boss pulled up in his expensive car with license plates that read, in effect, “Short Sale.” The sign was put in the yard and it was out there for all of our neighbors to see that we were losing our home. I know pride is bad, but that stung.

The house sold within a couple of weeks and the buyer, who was paying cash, wanted to close in two weeks. As soon as the decision was made to put the house on the market, the kids and I had known right away that we would use it as our opportunity to move home to the Ozarks, to start fresh. At that time, it seemed especially important to Blake that he go somewhere where no one knew about the accident. I think all of us were ready to get out from under it, really.

With just two weeks to find a place to rent and to organize a move, the boys and I did a lot of traveling back and forth between St. Louis and Springfield. I had an aunt in Marshfield, a small town just northeast of Springfield, who was kind enough to let us stay with her. That became our base of operations for our search.

Dylan has this odd little quirk – he tends to transpose numbers when he copies them. This made driving around writing down numbers from “For Rent” signs especially fun. There were times the search got tense. Sometimes we got lost (no GPS, not that it works reliably in these parts, anyway). Sometimes we had grand adventures, discovering new towns and interesting places.

Eventually, we found the perfect place: a three bedroom, two bath house on ten acres with an address in a little bitty town we’d never heard of. If you were to look up Elkland on Google, Wikipedia would tell you that they have seven churches and one serial killer. Armed with this knowledge, we went to check out said house. Just Dylan, Blake, and I made that trip. I remember the daisies were in full bloom in the lower pasture, and I fell in love. We signed a lease that day and plans were made to move in. We’d found our “farm.”

We asked where the nearest actual town was and were told Buffalo. So on our way home, we stopped by Buffalo to drive around and look at schools. We ate lunch at Dairy Queen and talked about how strange it was that this would be our hometown. It was all so new and exciting. We instantly adored the tiny town of 3,000, with its town square and minuscule Wal-Mart, which we later learned is the second smallest in the country. Up until then, all I knew of Buffalo was that it was the only cell phone reception in between Lebanon and Stockton Lake. I would later learn that my great-grandmother was from here.

The day of the move, Adam had made a dentist appointment. For whatever reason, no one from my family could be there, either. So the boys and I loaded the truck by ourselves, with only one incident—I fell off the truck, backwards. I remember lying there with the wind knocked out of me, thinking about how thoroughly pissed at life I was, while my boys hovered nervously over me, unsure if their mom was okay.

I have to give all three of my boys credit: they know how to work. At the time, they were 7, 8, and 11 and they worked as hard as any grown man loading our boxes and furniture on that truck. In fact, my boys and I usually get called in to help people move—friends, family, relative strangers. It’s something we hate to do but are absurdly good at.
​
I will say that when we bought new furniture for the house, my uncles on Mama’s side showed up to help unload it. I think my kiddos were slightly put out to be treated like kids after they’d worked so hard to load and unload the truck alone on moving day, but I was willing to roll with it just to not feel like a pack mule at least once. Sometimes I want to shout at the world “I’m a freaking girl; treat me like one.” Then when someone treats me like I can’t do something because I’m a girl, I get mad at them. I’m a fun little mystery like that. As much as I would miss the house in Eureka, I adored our new house in Elkland. The plan was to lease it until we could buy it and I had every intention of staying put until they carried me out in a pine box or shipped me off to a home as a little old lady. I was so proud of and happy with that little gray house.

We hadn’t been there long when two boys started hanging out at the end of the driveway on their bikes – one was a redhead about the age of my younger two, the other was a younger blond. After several days of staring at each other with a driveway between them, the two groups worked up the nerve to introduce themselves.

It turned out they lived right next door, and my boys were pretty impressed to find out that the older boy’s mother worked at Pizza Hut. My kids were fairly certain that made her the coolest mom ever. They were jealous. The kids became fast friends, and to this day—five years later—you can usually find the gang of them at either family’s house. In between the two dates there have been lots of trees climbed, creeks explored, and games of football.

Adam was nervous about moving his city kids to the country. I’d done my best to prepare them for the differences. For me, it was like finding a favorite pair of jeans that I’d thought were lost but had only been tucked away in a drawer. I was made for this life, this place. And as soon as I returned to it, I wondered how I survived so long away from it. When I was young, I had itchy feet. Now I have to tear myself away for even a weekend. These hills are my oxygen.

Despite the preparation, all the talks about how things are done down here and about things like snakes and poisonous plants and all that jazz, my children had a bit of adjusting to do.

We had a creek that ran through the middle of the property, but the kids had to climb a hill to get back if they went there, so they tended to go down the dirt road a bit to play in the creek where it crossed the road. There was no hill to climb that direction. One particular morning, they’d asked if they could play in the creek before breakfast. I said sure, but to come home soon because I was getting ready to start cooking. When breakfast had grown cold and they still weren’t back, I hopped in the car to go get them. (Hill or no, I was feeling kinda lazy.)

The boys were actually on their way back and when they saw the car coming. They reverted back to the Eureka way of doing things and jumped to the side of the road. (In the suburbs, if a car comes, they were taught to step into the grass and wait for it to pass.)

I stopped the car in the middle of the road, irritated and crabbing at them. Then I realized they were standing in poison ivy. So I crabbed at them about that as I went to retrieve Blake’s bike, which he’d tossed to the side in his “oh no, a car” panic… only to realize he’d thrown his bike on top of a copperhead snake.

“Let’s not tell your father about this,” I told them. In fact, I didn’t tell Adam that story until much later. I was afraid he’d whisk the boys back to St. Louis. To his credit, Adam did a lot of his own adjusting after we arrived. A suburban boy born and raised, he hadn’t even really been down to visit the Ozarks more than a handful of times in our marriage. He stepped into a completely foreign world and made it his home.

Despite the rocky start, my boys adapted quickly. It’s as if they had been made for this life, too. To the families who have been here for 200 years or more, we’re transplants. Newbies, city slickers, and – honest to goodness, Dylan got this his first year – “from the hood.” We’re outsiders, welcomed by some, resented by others.

My boys are all three big guys, something they inherited from my Mama’s side of the family. (Which is funny, because she’s tiny) The football coach took one look at Dylan and said “Please tell me you plan to be on the football team.” I couldn’t in a million years imagine my gentle giant trying out for football, but I think he was ready to be something new here, too. He agreed to try out and, is it turned out, was really good at football.

After football came wrestling, which Christopher also participated in. Being a football mom and then a wrestling mom were new experiences for me, and it was surprisingly fun. More importantly, it gave all of us a way to fit in. Blake tried his hand at basketball and archery. It drove him crazy to not be in the same sports as his brothers, but he still found his own way. Of course, Blake is such a happy and resilient person, he’ll always find his own way.

Still, it would irritate the boys when someone treated them like they weren’t quite smart because they’d never done something that comes as naturally as breathing to a peer. It irritated the fire out of me when for the longest time, I had people trying to explain country living to me, or “how it’s done down here.” I wanted to say, “I grew up roaming a 200 acre farm in a place nicknamed Booger County—I am from the country for heaven’s sake!” But I always tell my boys if you have to tell someone you are something, then odds are pretty good you aren’t, you just want to be.

The truth is, my kids and I are neither city nor country; we’re a bit of both. I have country roots, but I have 20 years of city flowing through my blood, too. I’m thankful for both.

I can’t completely blame my neighbors for thinking we’re odd little ducks. We are. We’ve never had the money to build up the same supplies or equipment they have; most of what we have was jury-rigged by myself and Dylan with occasional help from Blake or even sometimes Chris if we needed extra hands. My chicken coops look more like chicken shanties. My pallet fence is a Pinterest fail waiting to be documented. And I am always behind on my farm chores.

Still, I look back at what I knew five years ago, how much we’ve learned and how far we’ve come, and I’m proud of us. I don’t want to brag or anything, but if zombie apocalypse happens, my city friends really need to come find us. We’ve got you covered.

As usual, I had stellar timing with my move. I arrived on my farm just in time for the worst drought in recorded history. When the drought was just getting started, I don’t think anyone knew how bad it would get. Still, when the spring hay cutting was a disappointment (or non-existent), people started unloading horses, cheap.

I can be a bit obsessive, a trait which I passed on to my children. We don’t have much and are usually content with very little. But when we get it in our heads that we want something, we’re like a terrapin, we don’t let go. I had gotten it in my head that I wanted horses again. Sure, it was another stupid choice. The smarter path would have been to pay off the medical and tax debt first. But that wasn’t the path I took, and I have to admit that I don’t regret it.

Dixie was a red roan appaloosa with a gorgeous quarter horse build. She’d been in an accident—I never got all of the details on what exactly had happened to her—that had left her blind in one eye and with a divot in her neck. She had a quiet, unassuming nature that made her the perfect horse for a family healing from a horse injury. In many ways, I feel like Dixie and I saved each other. We also bought Casper, a matching little red roan appy. He had a thick neck, a mohawk main, and feathering on his legs. Casper adored kids. He was a handful if you put a grownup on his back, but if it was a kid, he was an angel.

They’d come from different states but they matched perfectly in color and temperament. They were the best of friends, and those two horses brought us back. The fear we’d had working with Samson after the accident began to melt away. And then one day I realized, it was gone. I was completely comfortable with our horses and I trusted them.

It was infinitely different having horses on your own property instead of a barn. No hay magically materialized for them. I had to sort through mountains of conflicting information to decide how best to care for them. Finding hay when you’re an outsider with no truck to haul it is hard enough. Finding hay in the worst drought in recorded history was impossible. I wound up finding a bagged hay called Chaffhaye that was expensive, but a lifesaver that year. My horses loved it and I became friends with the woman I bought my hay from, so I’ll call it a win.

All of the headache that comes with having your horses on your own property was worth it because it also brought a certain peace with it. For the first time, I could just sit in my field and be with my horses. If I wanted to work them, it was low-pressure and at our own pace. We developed a bond I’d never had the time to nurture with our horses at Jack’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be thankful for my time at Jack’s barn and all I learned there. But this easier, slower way of doing things was what we needed if we were ever going to be around horses again.

Somehow, we and our animals made it through that terrible drought. It was awful, seeing other horses and cattle drop dead in the fields, from starvation or because they’d poisoned themselves eating plants they would have normally stayed away from. At the time, it was easy to wonder if it would ever rain again. Wells ran dry. Topography changed. Livestock prices plummeted. But the people of this place are used to hardship. They might bend under the weight of it, but they don't break. And, like any bad thing, the memory of it softened a bit in the rear view mirror. The edge was taken off, but we were stronger for having done it.

to be continued... Casper and Dixie during our first winter on the farm