We Ate Chipotle at Our Wedding

We’ve made it to the end of our story. OK, not the end. Just the end of the telling.

When I left you last week, we were proud owners of an ugly shower and nearly 10 acres in Farmersville. We moved in at the beginning of September 2019, and within months we had a thriving, beautiful farm with zero issues and abundant flowers.

HA!! Just kidding. That’s not how literally anything works, right?

I remember my first week on the farm, staring out at the crispy brown Bermuda grass speckled with giant cracks in the ground that seemed to reach the center of the earth. We needed to build up some ground to plant in.

I wrestled back and forth. Should I use a tiller (we didn’t have a tractor implement, just a gas powered roto-tiller that was under $100 at Home Depot)? Should I just pile up some compost? Why is compost so expensive, I thought it was literal dirt, is it really $700 to have one load delivered?

I replayed those podcasts and re-scanned the book chapters and scoured other farmers’ highly curated Instagram feeds. How exactly do I cultivate this dry scab of a grass patch? Surely there’s a wrong way to do this. So I just did SOMETHING.

My neighbor was confused when I was dragging a box blade from the back of our tractor (that I had newly learned to operate) back and forth across the dead grass. I was trying desperately to break up the rock-hard dried out clay soil. The tiller, when fired up, bounced wildly like a possessed pogo stick off the ground, testing both my patience and my forearm strength and leaving me exhausted from an inch or two of progress.

Long story short, it was a hot mess. With Peter’s help on the weekends, we spent hours upon hours building up a few rows.

Soon I had seeds started. I had plants in the ground. I had vague plans for what we could do, and an overflowing font of hope, but I also had so much fear. Would a flower ever grow? Would I fall through a ground crack and have to become one with whatever is under this clay soil? Where would I sell these flowers, and more importantly, would anyone ever buy them?

In the meantime, Peter and I got married in our living room, officiated by my aunt Kristen, who is really more like my older sister and one of my most favorite people to ever exist. Our family was there and we ate Chipotle and Blue Bell Ice Cream. In other words, it was perfect.

I volunteered at election sites, and Peter commuted to downtown Dallas for work every day. And then! COVID-19. I’ll spare you the narrative of our pandemic days, as I know we all have stories from that time.

But fortunately, our business was brand new. We didn’t have a “normal” way of operating. We didn’t have a single customer, let alone a system for the pandemic to shake up. So we molded to fit the time.

The first flowers bloomed. We did porch deliveries. We advertised on our local Facebook and Instagram pages. We got orders from friends and family.

Then I got the call from Claudette Hatfield at the Rockwall Farmers Market. She was delighted that we had applied, and was sure the market committee would feel the same. The market started late that year, in June, thanks to COVID. We all wore masks and the tents were 10 feet apart.

But from that first market day, our first time to present ourselves as farmers to the world, you showed up. You bought our flowers. We sold out. And then you stayed and asked what we were trying to do.

That’s when we realized who the real hero of this story is. It’s you.

You gave us a face to imagine on the hard days when it’s 104 degrees and grasshoppers the size of small birds are flying past our heads. You showed us that this matters, that our dedication to this craft isn’t just about some silly flowers.

It’s about the hands that grow them passing the bouquet to the hands that put them on the entryway bookshelf. On the mantle. On the kitchen table. At the graveside of a loved one. In the hands of a tiny dancer after a recital.

It was never just about building a farm for us. It was about building a farm for you. We grow them, nurture them, and then let them mean what you need them to mean.

I know they’re just flowers and I know they just die. But they bring beauty and joy into our brief and wonderful lives — little exclamation points, scattered through, reminding us what it means to be alive.