A Funeral, a Documentary, a Beer, and a Casual 180

Maybe you’ve been wondering how Jenna and Peter went from China-town San Francisco-dwelling healthcare city kids to passionate flower farmers living in Farmersville, Texas. Yeah, it’s a fair question and a big leap, I know! And it’s the part people ask about the most.

The answer is both slowly and gradually, and also in a lightning-quick instant. That started with a google search. As so many things do these days.

But to get there, you have to travel to Raymond, South Dakota. Not much there.

When I left off last time, I was struggling. I had just moved cross-country, sold and donated most of my belongings. It wasn’t the picturesque solution to my problems I was banking on, but it turns out it was the metered descent to the place where truly nothing made sense anymore and I knew we needed to come up with a path forward.

If you’ve been in that place, you know that sometimes that’s when the best ideas come. That’s when the truest parts of you rise to the surface to show themselves to you. That’s when you really get to the core of who you are. And that’s exactly what happened to me.

At my actually-pretty-shitty coffee shop on Mason St, I sat there with a list of things I liked. I wish I was joking when I tell you the list said “flowers. puzzles. plants.” I don’t need to tell you how unhelpful that list was at first.

But, as Peter and I traveled to Raymond, SD for his nana’s funeral, the place where he often spent summers on his grandparents’ cattle farm, we started to talk about what his grandparents’ lives looked like and what we admired about that life.

It kept coming back to purpose. A feeling that the work you do is all building to something good: feeding the cows, tending the land. Not necessarily glamorous, or things that our expensive degrees would have prepared us for, but deeply meaningful day in and day out.

We imagined what our life in Dallas might look like, where we already thought we’d settle to be close to family. We imagined maybe a little garden. A chicken or two. Some mysterious imaginary job where everything you did felt purposeful.

We imagined that might look like running our own business. But doing what?

Flowers. Puzzles. Plants. I briefly considered starting a puzzle exchange but quickly decided that might not actually catch on.

But then, it all fell together pretty accidentally. We went to the Alamo Drafthouse we frequented to watch a movie one Saturday night. I hadn’t seen a documentary they were screening, so we opted for “The Biggest Little Farm.” I was excited to see it because we had been talking about the purpose-filled lives of farmers, but I certainly didn’t have expectations for my life changing as I walked away from it.

Sitting in that theater, I can’t begin to explain how moved I felt during the entire movie. Every animal, every plant, every problem they faced in the story of building their organic farm after corporate careers and apartment life brought me to tears.

After the movie we went to a German beer hall for a drink and to debrief what had just happened to us during that film. Turns out Peter and I were both so moved by the story, by the creatures, by the sense of purpose.

Maybe it’s not something like farming that we’re looking for. Maybe it’s actually farming.

But we’re children of suburbia. We’re not going to start a farm. That would be crazy. Wait. But what if we did? People have to start somewhere, right? And we’re not afraid of a challenge.

OK, but I don’t even like tomatoes very much. And vegetables, I don’t know that I feel that passionate about growing them. Too bad you can’t farm flowers.

You can’t farm flowers, right?

As silly as it sounds, after that thought I started looking at where some of my favorite flower shops got their flowers. It had really not occurred to me to think about where flowers were coming from. I googled Flowers for Dreams in Chicago, a favorite florist, and one line on their website stopped me in my tracks: “Check out the local flower farms we buy from!”

I nearly spit my beer across the table.

OK so apparently you can farm flowers, and people actually do it. My life was never the same after that moment.

It’s so rare to get moments like that, moments you can look back on and see your feet in two places: one in the life you led before that night, and another about to step into the new one.

That night launched us into the life we’re living now.