It’s bittersweet, really…this being one of the final few weekly Farm Notes before we transition to a monthly newsletter and begin publishing from here on the LDF on the last Sunday morning of each month, beginning January 25th.
Until then, I’ll have two more Farm Notes for you—one next week and one at the start of the new year to wrap up our story time and talk about what’s next.
If you missed Part 1 of story time, might I suggest you go back and read that here before continuing on today.
I’ve got a slight shift in the plans for this week’s story time…so come along with me and we’ll get to that original plan in the following week. I said this week’s Farm Note would be titled, “The call…” Still about a call, in a way…just a different one.
I’ll never forget the way the fear consumed me and almost swallowed me whole laying there under the covers.
Instead, it hurled me out of bed and sent me running down the stairs.
I climbed into my dad’s lap on the recliner, tears streaming down my face, trying to catch my breath.
My mom rushed to my side as my parents tried to console me in the living room, not having any earthly idea what could have caused such distress after having gone to bed that night perfectly fine.
It was the simple knowing that one day my parents were going to die that had me in an absolute fit.
I can’t even say how old I was when this happened…young enough that my bedspread had Cabbage Patch Kids on it. Young enough that I fit snugly curled up in my daddy’s lap.
But even now as I type this, at even just the recollection of it, my heart is pounding and the tears are streaming down my face and my palms are sweating all over my laptop.
It was a deep, visceral, childhood fear that apparently hasn’t actually left my adult body.
I’ll never forget the way my parents laughed with relief and hugged me to them. “Oh, honey,” they consoled me over and over again as they tried to assure me they weren’t going anywhere, until I could be put back to bed.
Don’t ask me why or where it came from, but I developed and carried with me this fear of being called with bad news out of the blue or being woken up in the dead of night to something gone wrong.
I’d answer the phone in an absolute panic during the duty day on base thinking that something had gone horribly wrong, when it was only my mom phoning to see if I had a free moment just to say hi. My parents thought it was ridiculous that I’d get so worked up and they’d always ask me what the heck I was imagining had gone wrong.
So when my phone rang in the actual middle of oneAugust night in 2018 and I answered it to the words of my crying mother telling me my dad suffered a heart attack and died just before he was headed to work that morning as a nuclear power contractor in the United Arab Emirates, I woke Chris up immediately and he had me booked on a flight within just a few minutes from Philadelphia and I was out the door on my way to my mom in Florida shortly after that.
It’s like my body had this inner knowing all along and had been steadying me to be ready to act in that moment and not completely and totally fall apart.
It turned out I was going to need all the steadiness I could muster in those following months to sort out my father’s affairs before leaving and then while I deployed for six months (that nightmare involving no will, overseas bank accounts, and Sharia Law) to none other than the United Arab Emirates where my sister also happened to have gotten stationed for a year, too.
Back in March of that year, we’d found out that she, my dad, and I, were all meant to overlap one another there for a period of six months. Our dad was living and working just a quick drive from where we were going to be stationed. We’d called it a miracle. We couldn’t believe our luck.
But I spent those six months in the desert very quietly and internally questioning everything.
Before I’d left for the UAE, I’d actually been feeling quite lost. The year prior, I’d separated from active duty service and transitioned into the Air Force Reserve after turning down a job to work at NATO and live in the Netherlands for a few years, in order to pursue this little dream I’d developed of building a coaching practice to help people heal.
Up until that point I was having trouble really finding a way to break through.
What I was desperately wanting to help people with was to give up dieting altogether in order to cultivate a healthier lifestyle.
It was what I’d been learning as I progressed through my master’s degree and the follow-on coaching certifications and started diving into client work.
It was the very thing that was helping me begin to heal from the disordered eating and the deprivation and the fad diets and the constant body shaming and opting in to this insane expectation we have of each other as humans to look a certain way.
But my messaging was falling flat and it seemed as though everyone was flocking to all the diet coaches. I’d hired a business coach for far more than my little budding business had even made who I never did quite jive with. Instead of thinking perhaps her approach wasn’t the right fit for me, I took it as yet another sign that maybe I wasn’t meant to do the work I felt like I was supposed to.
My dad had been in poor health for a number of years during all of this. He never really ate the best, didn’t exercise, and was on a whole host of medications to treat a growing list of symptoms and issues.
I tried repeatedly to share what I was learning in my degree. To make suggestions. To encourage small shifts in behavior. To nudge him to take better care of himself.
But I never could break through.
During those months in the desert alongside my sister, but without our dad, when I was alone on a run or had time to myself, I felt like I’d failed both myself and him, too.
With all the education and the training and the knowledge I now had, if I couldn’t even help my own father, how did I think I was going to do anything for all these people I was dreaming I’d help?
Just two weeks before my dad passed, my family was in St. Augustine, Florida on a family vacation…the first time the six of us had been together in years.
My dad had flown all the way back stateside for the trip but wasn’t feeling well in the brutal Florida summer heat, and that vacation had devolved into an airing of family grievances that had been building for some time.
Sadly, it’s not a fond memory for any of us.
But especially not for me, who sat with my mom and dad in a quiet moment on a boardwalk in the shade where I pulled my dad aside to voice my concern for his wellbeing.
I’m really worried about you, dad. And I just really wish you’d take better care of yourself. You’re always asking me when Chris and I are going to get married and when you’re going to have grandchildren, but I’m only 30 years old. I’m afraid that if you don’t start taking better care of yourself, you’re not going to even be here for it someday if or when we’re ready.
(…In real time, I paused for a long while here to hold onto this precious baby in my belly while I sat and let my chest actually physically ache from the weight of today’s reality of that memory.)
He and my mom had that same, “Oh, honey” tone of endearment as they hugged me and he told me he’d do his best, and it struck me that he seemed to have been both the most serious and sincere that he’d ever been about the topic before. It felt like maybe this time there really was going to be a shift.
When we dropped him off at the airport to head back to work in the UAE, I held up the cars in the drop off line and hugged him four times before letting him walk through those automatic airport doors.
Fifteen days later he was gone.
Even today, I don’t rush people in the drop off line at the airport.
In the desert, where I was and he wasn’t, is where I shook my fists at the heavens in anger…mostly at the world and the situation…but partly at my dad, too.
I couldn’t shake the thought back then that he just didn’t love us enough to take better care of himself…to make sure he’d be around so we’d have him to love him for longer.
Before that deployment I’d been ready to give up on my “business” and the prospect of coaching. On that deployment, now I really had no clue what I was going to do next.
I decided, though, that I’d go back to school when I got back home to get an MBA. If I wasn’t going to build a coaching practice, perhaps I’d learn to build a company or develop a product…or go work for some firm if all else failed.
My dad’s little dream in those years he was working as a nuclear power contractor and finally making money after my parents had struggled financially for decades, was to buy a big, quiet piece of land and put a manufactured house on it. That was his retirement dream for him and my mom when he got done working after a few more years in the UAE.
But they never did get to realize that dream.
So on the day that I drove up to this farm to see it for the very first time, I couldn’t stop thinking on the drive home about this big, quiet piece of land with a manufactured house on it that we’d just found in Upstate New York.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how, for several years leading up to stepping foot onto this farm, that Chris and I had this little wooden sign hung on our dining room wall in our city row home that said, “Our Farm House” or that I’d picked up this little steel house and told Chris that we should light it up and maybe one day we’d even have a real little farm of our own.
When I stood with David for the first time together on this farm and I asked him, “I noticed you have a sign holder at the bottom of the driveway but no sign for the farm. If you’d had given it a name, what would you have called it?” and he replied, “I always wanted to call it the Little Dream Farm,” I knew in my bones that none of this was just a coincidence.
It took so many walks up and back our quiet, hilly, winding country road all these years later for me to have the mental space to consider that perhaps it wasn’t at all that my dad didn’t love us enough to take better care of himself in order for us to have more time with him.
But rather, maybe it was that he never really loved himself enough to know or believe how much it mattered.
Certainly I can relate to that, because there’ve been times in my life that I didn’t love myself a whole lot either.
I wonder how many of us can relate to that.
There were so many hardships and so much sadness and, at the time, what felt like so much personal failure all wrapped up in this coaching dream, that I wanted to walk away from the health and wellness space altogether.
And in many ways, many times through the years I have.
I went and got that MBA. I came up with a company that I loved the idea of but ultimately decided not to pursue. I dove head long into cat rescue. I took on one set of active duty orders after the next. I’ve applied to countless jobs at soulless corporations across the country. I grew a giant freaking flower patch and thought about getting a herd of cows and going full-fledged farmer.
None of these things ever felt quite like that dream did, and yet I kept trying real hard to convince myself that door should be closed and that ship had sailed.
And then my health got wonky. And I got news that I was going to lose my job. And I was left with nothing but time to sit around and think while I rested and put my focus on helping and allowing my body to heal.
My mom has said to me through the years, “When one door closes another door opens…but boy is it hell in the hallway.”
In that space at the start of this year…in what felt like that dreadful and agonizing quiet…I had a recollection—a remembering of a smattering of things I learned long ago but had maybe misplaced or forgotten along the way.
I took the news of my poor health so hard not because I thought I couldn’t heal…but because I had this unshakable hunch that maybe it meant that everything I’d been doing to try to walk so far away from this one thing was actually what may have been causing it.
And again, Brianna Wiest’s words I shared with you in the Week 49 Farm Note come to mind,
“You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours. Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period—a growth concourse—through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.”
What do you say we leave it here for this week and pick up again the next?
I planned this week to talk about “The call…” as this week’s Note was always intended to be titled. But upon sitting down to write this, I guess a different (phone) call was on my heart that sparked this story I’ve never told.
So for next week I’ll endeavor to get us back on track to wrap up the final Farm Note of this year. In the first week of the new year I’ll fill ya in on where things are headed.
Until then, on Sunday we awake to the Winter Solstice—the shortest day and longest night of the year. Know that I’m wishing you every ounce of peace and joy and good tidings in these last days of 2025.
See you back here next week.
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