Little did Sanderson know I’d already planned to put that back on you, with a call in last Tuesday’s chat for examples of your own.

The result was a cornucopia of cozy kitchen gardens, with nary a castle among them. Unless of course you believe that every home is a castle.

Notably present was this photo of actual, real-life, egg-producing layer hens, and unlike the sole image representing fowl in Musgrave’s book, they’re in sharp focus!

That came from , who by the way also writes the Substack Security n Cigars. Here’s a description of his kitchen garden:

We live in Western Washington, in zone 8b. We do get temps as low as 15F in the winter, and summer temps are generally 70F but can get in the 80’s occasionally. Some summers we see almost no sun; others, we have a pleasant, warm summer. We have backyard chickens as well as raised bed and horse trough planters. My wife usually plants sweet peas, tomatoes, tomatillos, a bunch of herbs (lavender, oregano, thyme, rosemary), radishes, garlic plus various flowers that help with pest control. And we have two grape vines that actually will produce grapes, but are decorative.

The metal horse-trough planters were of particular interest to me, as I’m in the middle of an experiment with raised beds for the first time. Reader Paul Smith—who incidentally also won a free copy of The Kitchen Garden in the publisher’s giveaway—showcased these same metal troughs in his submission. I love the look of them, spilling over with blooms, the mountains in the background and greenhouse there to the left. It’s a great pic!

About Paul’s kitchen garden:

I live near Albuquerque, NM, in zone 7b. I use raised beds to grow flowers and veggies, and horse-watering tanks help keep the pests out.

I bet there in the desert, those raised beds make a lot of sense, as you can build up your own soil inside the beds to grow vegetables and flowers that might need more than the desert soil is able to provide them.

From another kind of landscape entirely—the rainy UK—came this example of a wild and wonderful food forest.

Love this idea! I live at the seaside in East Sussex (about an hour’s drive from Robertsbridge, actually), and this is my food-forest garden. I am still establishing a food forest, where all the different layers support one another, but I have already noticed an improvement with the slug issue we have around here!

— From another Substack writer over at .

For more examples, see the chat. Each contributor received a six-month paid membership to Brunette Gardens. Thanks to all of them for their shares, and I hope you’ll check out the writers’ newsletters, too.

An honorable mention goes to reader , whose text-only entry struck me as possessing the quality of a tone poem:

I used those 2x4’ aluminum beds and the 2’ rings. Can’t show a picture, as it is an overgrown mess right now. We had rain, and I got sick. I did plant fruit trees and already had berry bushes. I will get some veggies, but not like I’d planned. Rural KS

I’m a big softie for gardeners struggling with illness and rain, and how many of us get other than we planned, right? She wouldn’t share a photo even though I said messes were the point of the exercise, but I gave her a 3-month comp all the same. If you’re curious to know about her berries, she’s planted four kinds, but it’s the marionberries so far that are yielding fruit.

To continue on the raised-bed theme, here’s my own example. The wooden ones are repurposed shipping boxes, free from our agricultural extension office; I scored the green metal one for $5 at a yard sale, and the keyhole planter was a splurge. It’s made out of sheet metal. The shape makes it very easy to work with, so the investment was worth it.

In these, I’ve successfully harvested lettuce, carrots, radishes, and cucumbers, with tomatoes, peppers, okra, zucchini, and squash on the way. The half barrels are full of calendula, which attract pollinators and can also be used to make a nice salve; nearby, in permanent beds near the house and deck, I grow perennial thyme, sage, tarragon, hyssop, mint, and oregano. I gave away our chickens when we moved to a rural area, where I now buy eggs and raw milk directly from a farmer, who’s also taught me to milk her two cows, Belle and Bessie.

Here’s the review that kicked off the kitchen-garden call, in case you missed it.

You might like this book of poetry for its garden themes.

Broom of Anger

I mean, look at that cover, for starters. It’s the kind of book you’d want on your living-room coffee table, especially if your living room were decked out in Brunette Gardens theme colors.

And if garden porn were a thing, which it is, of course, because if it exists, there’s porn for it, The Kitchen Garden’s centerfold would be the entry for Perch Hill.

Aaaaah… Perch Hill, in Robertsbridge, East Sussex, England. It’s the home and business of Sarah Raven, author of 14 books. Her website demurely states, “The Sarah Raven brand was first established in 1999 with a humble seed list1,” but when I gaze at photos of that incredible garden set amidst ninety acres, it seems far away from its humble origins. The Kitchen Garden’s author, Toby Musgrave, describes it thusly:

Viewed from above, plantings in the orderly array of beds within the enclosed perennial cutting garden take on a jewel-like appearance on a misty autumnal morning.

Um, “thusly”? Is this how I’m talking now that I’ve finished The Kitchen Garden?

My own garden rarely if ever takes on a jewel-like appearance—not even on a misty autumnal morning.

You see what I mean by garden porn.

But you might as well get a copy of this beautiful book, in my definitely humble opinion as someone who has not written 14 books on gardening but has been stumbling around in gardens all her life. The Kitchen Garden is a wonderful fantasy escape if, like me, you’re turned on by “terracotta pots of flame-coloured tulips” and a “tapestry-like planting […] where edibles and flowers intermingle”—both also to be found at Perch Hill.

Other worthy moments:

• An elliptical, walled garden, the only one of its kind, in West Sussex, England

• Castle gardens in Scotland, West Sussex again, and of course, Versailles

• A manorial farmhouse villa (“it is really too grand to be called a farmhouse,” says Musgrave) with a lake view on an island in Norway

This book made me yearn for a stone garden wall, that I might train my fruit trees against, in espalier fashion. And who wouldn’t want to live at Sleepy Cat Farm, with its children’s storybook name, picture-perfect Victorian greenhouse, and enigmatic squash arch? It’s a place where, Musgrave promises, “Edibility, formality, and geometry unite” (46).

Rows of perky vegetables interspersed with beckoning blooms, onions lined up in neat storage trays rimmed in white, a pristine pebble path leading you toward a bubbling fountain: A fantasy escape for dreamy gardeners like no other.

But The Kitchen Garden is not just that. It’s also a well-researched history.

Musgrave weaves the kitchen gardens’ back story through a visual-narrative tour of 52 of them chosen for inclusion. “Rural villas of wealthy Romans had kitchen gardens,” he relates in the introduction, and then he asks us to consider the Zuni pueblo gardens and Aztec floating chinampas as examples of the same.

The list of 52 is not quite as diverse as you’d think, however; all but one of the 11 American gardens are in coastal states, and none of the gardens chosen from across the world float or even showcase anything as quirky as, for example, Sepp Holzer’s permaculture terraces2. The UK dominates, with Central and Northern Europe shouldering over to make room for a smattering from New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, two South African gardens, and a single one from Singapore.

I wish Musgrave, whose bio says he’s “an acknowledged authority on garden history,” had used footnotes and citations for those of us who’d like a deeper dive. He does include a short “further reading” section at the end.

“In the United States,” he writes, “the oldest documented community garden was founded in 1759 in Bethabara, North Carolina, and is gardened still” (16). There’s a decided preference for community efforts across the selections, but only when those communities are urban, as in the case of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Berlin’s Prinzessinnengarten Kollektiv. The former is praised for its “equitable distribution programme,” which hands out produce “at little or no cost” to New Yorkers, who pay on an honor system, “practicing economic solidarity with your community because fresh food should be a right and not a privilege” (53).

Just as there’s porn for everything, even gardens are political.

Or maybe gardens are especially political these days.

I’m not saying gardens should be divorced from politics. I appreciate Musgrave pointing out, for example, that 96 percent of the vegetable cultivars available to Americans 120 years ago have been lost. That’s a sad fact for our food security and our taste buds, too.

But despite the fantasy photo spreads and informed history, The Kitchen Garden filters the story of kitchen gardens through a political lens, and an elite one at that.

For the section on Monticello, there’s no mention that Thomas Jefferson brought viticulture to the United States, an important detail for kitchen-garden history. The tsk-tsk of “enslaved labour” isn’t contextualized, not that I’m in any way defending the abhorrent practice: Monticello isn’t the only garden among the 52 with that history, though it’s the only one called out. Villandry was owned by a wealthy slave trader3, and there are probably others.

You would expect a book on gardens attached to home kitchens to include some animals, but this one seems to want to hide their role. Musgrave reports that at the Stone Edge Farm in Sonoma, California, “free-range chickens roaming the olive grove (which produces fruit and oil) not only give eggs but also contribute to pest control by consuming the olive fruit-fly larvae that overwinter in the soil” (26). What a great pairing of gardening and husbandry techniques, just the kind I see regularly in the humble homesteaders I know. But there’s no picture of the birds. In the entirety of The Kitchen Garden, there’s only one photo of a chicken—at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley. And that one’s blurry, as if to obscure any reference to the omnivorous diet humans have followed since the beginning of time. Likewise, in the section on Bahía Bustamante Lodge in Argentina, there’s a reference to homemade compost made from manure but again no pictures of the chickens, horses, or sheep that provided it.

This all begs the question: Where does the “kitchen garden” end, and homesteading (or smallholding if you’re a Brit) begin?

It seems that homesteading/smallholding is a populist endeavor while kitchen gardens are only for elites with manors or former palace grounds.

Joel Salatin might have the best method for employing chickens in the production of compost, but I’m sure Musgrave didn’t even think to include him in this book. It’s not Salatin’s business that kept him out, either—that Perch Hill owner sells everything from heart-shaped trowels to Scottish socks. It’s probably Salatin’s social status (more working-class) and his politics (contrarian). At a homesteading conference back in 2023, I watched him demo humane, efficient chicken-butchering.

It’s hard to fully champion a tome giving such short shrift to our mutually dependent relationship with domesticated animals when the topic is our 12,000-year history with kitchen gardening. While there’s just the one blurry chicken photo, an entire garden devoted to the vegan lifestyle earned a place. Not even the photo spread of a private garden in Denmark said to include a chicken coop and ducks in its mandala-shaped design shows any of the fowl.

Neither does Musgrave share details about who actually works these gorgeous gardens, what time and resources they put in. Likely sizable staffs, most if not all of them. What was the cost to install each one, and what are the expenses to maintain them? There are many references to garden designers, too, some of them celebrities like Hugo Bugg.

One of the most interesting gardens is Funan Urban Garden. Musgrave refrains from calling it a garden on top of a shopping mall, but that’s what it is. Neither does he explain that the garden is a for-profit enterprise, a company with what seems to be a solid business model. Contrast that with the non-profit Brooklyn Navy Yard and its honor-system, which apparently does work. But that’s not too surprising, as homesteaders have relied on their honor-system farm stands probably since the dawn of agriculture (I shop at one every week). Musgrave seems to think the Brooklyn folks invented the concept.

I probably sound harsh, but I still enjoyed the book. While the gardens presented are out of the reach of 99 percent of readers, you can still derive many useful takeaways from their techniques. For example:

• I noted eye-catching combinations of plants that also grow well in my area, such as sunflowers paired with pumpkins or cosmos.

• The loveliest gardens make use of varying heights, with vines clambering up structures, and large trees, especially fruit trees, drawing the eye upward.

• You might not be able to duplicate Sleepy Cat Farm’s “magnificent” 13 acres, but anyone can use these bamboo pole supports.

• I tagged a number of pages specifically for examples of mown-grass paths, an element I’m hoping to design into our new garden.

• Why stick to linear rows when gentle curves or even that mandala shape could work just as well, or maybe even better?

Besides these practical pulls, it’s always nice to dream big. Maybe someday I’ll even visit some of the fantasy gardens in this book, though the only one I can get to easily is also the sole garden that features an iconic red barn: the Seed Savers headquarters in Decorah, Iowa.

In coordination with the publisher, Phaidon, I’m giving away a hardcover copy of The Kitchen Garden to one (U.S.-only) subscriber I’ll pull from the list tomorrow at 11 am US CDT. The winner will hear from the Phaidon publicist directly about getting the copy.

Exodus is a deceptively simple story, too: Moses travels to Egypt, demands Pharaoh let his people go, and then bests Pharaoh when the tyrannical ruler refuses his request, leading the Israelites to freedom.

When God calls Moses to this incredible task, he says he will perform various miracles, all of which will essentially trump Pharaoh’s own rule backed by a pantheistic suite of Egyptian gods. There’s also something curious in what God promises to do:

And the Lord said to Moses, ‘When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.’ (Exodus 4:21 NKJV, my emphasis)

Church leaders and church ladies alike have been flummoxed by this perplexing puzzle: Why does God harden Pharaoh’s heart? If the Almighty has the power to alter Pharaoh’s feelings, shouldn’t he make him nicer, not more evil?

The answer is no.

God had to harden Pharoah’s heart to keep him from using contrition as a manipulation tactic.

Think of the classic domestic abuse dynamic. Women—and it often is women, but of course not always—remain with their abusive husbands not because they like the hurling force of his beatings but for the nice times, the heady intensity of all that spirit and energy turned into rushing love and promises and sweetness. Every single smack across a woman’s face was preceded by a few caressing strokes across her cheek.

It’s in our human nature to forgive and forget. Those in power—whether petty tyrant in the home or colossal tyrant over a kingdom—take unfair advantage of the human capacity to acquiesce, to relent, to let bygones be bygones.

If God hadn’t hardened Pharaoh’s heart, the Israelites would never have followed Moses.

They’d have remained enslaved forever.

In the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, notice how God instructs Moses specifically to take the long way out, as the shorter route is the scene of a war:

Then it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, “Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt.” So God led the people around by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea. (13:17-18, my emphasis)

When faced with the possibility of being drawn into a war, the Israelites will return to slavery instead. Perhaps that’s understandable; war is hell. But then, as soon as circumstances on their journey got rough, they immediately wanted to go back to Egypt anyway…

Through Moses, God had performed divine miracles, delivering them out of the hands of Pharaoh. He had also orchestrated the ultimate act:

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. (14:21-22)

All that still wasn’t enough for them.

God provides his people with water to drink on their journey, yet early on, they’re already doubting the mission, the “whole congregation” complaining and turning against Moses (16:2). They cry out:

Oh, that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger (16:3).

The children of Israel seem incapable of feeding themselves, so accustomed had they become to lives as slaves.

In a time period in which people naturally and routinely lived off of the land.

Now, yes, they were refugees and not settled people. But still. They’re saying here they’d rather have died as slaves with their bellies full than starve as free men and women.

Think about that for a moment.

The Israelites preferred slavery, where food is a given, to freedom, which means providing for themselves.

In Exodus, God is a generous provider, granting them manna (bread) from heaven and meat (quail) that wanders right into their campsite—food they don’t have to work to obtain.

The story goes on in that same seesaw manner, with God providing and the Israelites pacified for only a short time before they look for easy living again.

If God had not hardened Pharaoh’s heart, these people simply wouldn’t have followed Moses out of Egypt. If Pharaoh had relented with the beatings, increased their food rations, or eased up on their toil, the Israelites would have remained. If Pharaoh had simply held off from pursuing them across the Red Sea, maybe they’d have threatened to return even earlier. If God hadn’t rained free food down upon them, they might have gone back once faced with the need to fend for themselves.

After the dust settled on their exodus, they might have even felt bad for Pharaoh, thinking, he wasn’t such a terrible tyrant after all, right?

Maybe that’s why God took care of Pharaoh.

Did he die when the Red Sea rushed back in?

And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and when the morning appeared, the sea returned to its full depth, while the Egyptians were fleeing into it. So the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. Then the waters returned and covered the chariots, the horsemen, and all the army of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them. Not so much as one of them remained. (14:27-28)

Not so much as one of them remained. That seems to imply the Red Sea rushing back into itself killed Pharaoh along with his army. In the Hollywood version of the story, Yul Brynner as Pharaoh rides out with the troops, but ever the coward, he stops short of following them into the parted sea, proclaiming, “This is work for a butcher, not a pharaoh.”

That fits the fictionalized character created for the movie, and it’s not the only liberty Hollywood directors took with the story. However, Pharaoh’s death is a matter of debate among religious scholars, as both Biblical and supporting texts are ambiguous.

Let’s assume he did perish. Could we call that a just execution?

of the Substack would say yes. He draws a parallel between the Pharaoh of Moses’ time and The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, eliminated by American forces this spring as part of Operation Epic Fury. Referring to the commentary of Rabbenu Bahya, Tauber writes:

Pharaoh […] had already committed such terrible crimes, most notably the decree that Hebrew infants be murdered, that he had forfeited the right to repent. At some point, evil crosses a threshold. In that spirit we might ask: if Hitler—may his name be erased—had suddenly repented at the end of the war after murdering six million Jews, could forgiveness have been granted? Some might say yes. Judaism does not.

That’s key: At some point, evil crosses a threshold. The Israelites may have been hardwired to accept their slave status in exchange for crumbs from Pharaoh’s table, and maybe he could have been redeemed in the midst of their tendency to acquiesce. But when Pharaoh ordered the slaughter of every first-born Israelite, he forfeited the right to repent.

Pharoah’s brutal decree had given birth to Moses’ origin story, for his mother saved Moses from the goon squad; she set him into a basket to float down the Nile. Pharaoh’s own daughter retrieved the infant Moses, becoming his surrogate mother.

The link between Moses’ salvation and the Israelites’ deliverance was Pharaoh’s evil.

God wasn’t going to let Pharaoh’s contrition keep the Israelites beholden to him.

It’s true whether Pharaoh’s contrition was something he would have authentically felt or just used as a ploy.

Think about our modern domestic abusers again. They might truly feel contrite and loving in the moments when they’re gentle, caressing, and kind. They might even switch so fully as to put their loved ones up on a pedestal, an experience that can feel dizzying, as it fools you. Imagine being elevated from slave to goddess in one swooping gesture.

What if Pharaoh instituted a “slave of the day” program, letting a slave chosen by lottery each day dine at his own table?

You can see how effective contrition can be at keeping chains in place.

So why didn’t God harden the Hebrews’ hearts instead? Why didn’t he turn them fully against Pharaoh, so they’d never, ever want to go back?

That would seem like exactly what the hurt person in the relationship needs to do in order to stop acquiescing. For an example, I turn your attention to this 1981 song by Quarterflash and its lyrics about a woman who hardens her heart and swallows her tears in order to leave a lover who’s hurting her. (It’s also a fabulous take on the surreal genre that is the eighties music video, complete with a flamethrower-wielding gentleman in a tux. 💖)

However, hardening the Hebrews’ hearts would have put the burden back on the victims to change on their own in the middle of the very circumstances that had conditioned them into dependency on Pharoah in the first place.

It was too much to ask, and it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Why not?

Read more

How could the brutal rapes I endured when I was just a little girl have any meaning at all? How could your trauma experience be anything more than a source of deep pain for you?

It’s important to note that the work of finding meaning in our suffering can’t be rushed, or demanded. It may never come, in some cases. Telling someone, “It’s all part of God’s plan,” or “But look how well you’ve done” or “That’s why you’re so wise” can cause real damage. These responses deny trauma’s inherent unfairness and the suffering it brings.

But when we’re ready, can we still find meaning in it?

With this question in mind, I turn to the Genesis story of Joseph.

Joseph’s own brothers fake his death and sell him into slavery, and their motivation for these evil deeds is mere jealousy. Joseph had received the favor of not one but actually two fathers:

1. Their own, as Joseph was the firstborn of their father’s favorite wife.

2. God the Father, who gives Joseph a prophetic vision, as he describes, “There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Then, behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright; and indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7 NKJV).

We might see Joseph’s vision as evidence of how God favored him, or maybe it was another example of something in Joseph that even as a child put him a cut above.

In the wake of his brothers’ egregious betrayal, Jacob nonetheless maintains his faith in God by acting with integrity in everything he does while enslaved in Egypt. Joseph never loses faith, not in God, and not in himself, either. He continues to live according to the model set by his faith, even as an enslaved Hebrew in Egypt. Because of his integrity and good work, he rises in his master’s house to a position of responsibility.

However, though “the Lord was with Joseph,” he experiences further setbacks despite the fact that he consistently walks with God. Joseph spurns the sexual advances of his Egyptian master’s wife, and she retaliates by claiming he tried to rape her. But because Joseph always acted with integrity, and his master knew the Lord was with Joseph, his life is spared. He’s not put to death but rather sent to prison, and possibly an elite one at that, “a place where the king’s prisoners were confined” (39:2-20).

Joseph continues to live with integrity in prison, and just as had happened in his master’s house, authorities trust him and allow him to rise in position. He’s soon keeper of the prison.

Prophetic dreams come into play a second time when he tells two imprisoned officers of Pharoah the meaning of theirs. The one who survives the ordeal and is restored to Pharoah’s good graces? Joseph kindly asks him to remember Joseph to Pharoah. The man does not, of course, until it benefits him to do so—much later.

Finally given the opportunity, Joseph is called before Pharaoh. He interprets Pharaoh’s dream to foretell a period of seven years of bounty followed by seven years of famine. He recommends Pharaoh “select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt” to manage the years of plenty in preparation for the years of scarcity. Notably, Joseph doesn’t put himself forward as that man, but Pharaoh sees him as the only choice: “Can we find such a one as this, a man in whom is the Spirit of God?” (41:33-36).

Pharaoh gives Joseph power in Egypt second only to his. This lowly man, a Hebrew slave, has been elevated far beyond his station. Yet he uses this power only for the good it was intended: He guides Egypt through the years of feast and famine with wisdom and care.

You might ask why God didn’t just skip Joseph over the suffering times. An all-powerful God could surely have plucked a strong, faithful, good man like Joseph up out of his misery and set him down in Egypt, where he could quickly get to the business of saving everyone from famine.

The answer to that is also the answer to where we might find meaning in our own suffering: When his brothers sold him into slavery, he was starved of his family’s love, his own birthright, the safety of his tribe—everything.

Joseph had to starve in order to learn what to do when faced with starvation.

Now the story comes full circle when famine descends, and Joseph’s very own brothers travel to Egypt for relief.

This is where the tale might challenge your assumptions about Christian forgiveness.

When his family enters and requests some of the stored grain, Joseph does not immediately embrace them, letting bygones be bygones.

He’s carried the truth of his own suffering all this while. When he’d begun to rise for a second time in Egypt and asked the man in prison to remember him to Pharaoh, he’d also spoken directly of his own suffering, naming the injustices against him. He told the man, “For indeed I was stolen away from the land of the Hebrews; and also I have done nothing here that they should put me into the dungeon” (40:14-16).

So Joseph had spoken the truth of both his innocence and his deprivation. He’d always known he’d been wronged, doubly wronged, and pleading for help from the man whose dream he’d just interpreted had been an attempt to have his grievances properly redressed.

When his brothers appear before him to request grain, they do not recognize him, which is telling: They never believed the prophecy of his dream, so they cannot see him for its embodiment.

Joseph then tests them.

The first test is for his brothers to bring him his youngest brother, Benjamin, his beloved from the same mother.

The second is to return the money they were supposed to have paid for the grain, which Joseph ordered hidden in the sacks they take home.

Joseph’s family passes both tests by returning to him with Benjamin and with the recovered money.

We might understand these “tests” in modern times as Joseph testing the boundaries with his family. Have they treated Benjamin as badly as they treated him? Will they resort to lies and deceit, as they did when they faked Joseph’s death and sold him into slavery?

Still, he holds off even after they pass these tests, offering one more: Will they allow his brother Benjamin to be taken as a slave? The answer is no, as Judah puts his foot down. Returning without Benjamin will surely kill their father, he says, as he has already lost his beloved Joseph, his first-born.

It’s only then, overcome with emotion, that Joseph reveals himself to his brothers.

They’re ashamed by their past betrayals and fear his righteous reprisal. But this is his moment of forgiveness, a grace granted from a position of power. In it he takes away the sting of that past hurt by reframing it, giving his own suffering great meaning:

I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not therefore be grieved or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For these two years the famine has been in the land, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout the land of Egypt. (45:4-8)

Joseph tells Pharaoh of his family reunion, and Pharaoh grants permission for him to bring his whole family to Egypt, permanently. Joseph tells his brothers to “tell my father of all my glory in Egypt” when they go to bring him back.

So what does this mean for us and our own suffering? I have not guided any civilizations through famine, and my family does not come to me, seeking grain. When I asked my father to admit his past crimes, he refused, failing the test.

For merely speaking the truth and seeking justice, my mother and two of my siblings rejected me, ousting me from the tribe.

But I can look at my life, what I went through, and see that through my suffering as a child, I developed both great empathy and resilience. Empathy has allowed me to understand, and that enables me to help others heal—with my speech and my actions, driven by a heart of grace. And strength has ensured I could remain steadfast through all the other suffering life has brought my way since childhood’s end.

I’ve been rewarded for these efforts, with a loving family of my own to replace my broken birth family, a long, satisfying career, and finally, full health in body and soul.

What I never imagined is that I would also gain a powerful walk with God.

Maybe you will similarly find meaning in what you’ve survived. I hope so.

Speaking of dream interpretation, you might like my Dreamslippers stories about a family of detectives who solve crime using their ability to slip into other people’s dreams…

Book 1: Cat in the Flock

Book 2: Framed and Burning

Book 3: Bound to the Truth

Boxed Set: All 3 Books + Novella

Of course there were only nine votes, and maybe the other 800+ people who read the post have not been personally affected by trauma. Maybe they just signed up for gardening tips and were annoyed that I was even asking the question.

But still. It’s something for me to think about, as your writer.

As I’ve mentioned, one of the most popular posts so far this year was the one I wrote about suicide.

My whole life, I’ve had to challenge myself on that topic.

My youngest brother, Jason, and I have actually argued about suicide as a right, and a valid decision. A therapist once told me to tell him, “No one’s ever come back from that decision to tell us it’s the right one.” She was very influenced by New Age gurus like Jack Kornfield and Pema Chödrön. Instead of offering any insights of her own, from her own practice with actual people who’d contemplated suicide, she was always quoting these gurus, or recommending their books.

“No one’s ever come back to tell us it’s the wrong one, either,” Jason retorted. Touché, right?

That’s the problem with New Age thinking: It’s often circular. Like, “you are perfect as you are” but “when we resist change, it’s called suffering.”

This particular therapist’s office looked as if a gay pride parade had thrown up all over it, and, as the New Age gurus like to say, there are no coincidences. Here’s a quote from Yellowstone’s Beth Dutton that resonated with me far more than any of those stupidly useless bromides:

Thinking about a majority of survey responders being personally touched by trauma in light of the popularity of my suicide post put me in the mind of this Jordan Peterson talk on Genesis. About an hour into the thing, he addresses suicide, by way of suffering. I’ve started the video right where he shifts into talking about Goethe’s Faust, as a springboard into suicide.

“You have to be pushed a long way, generally speaking,” Peterson says, “before you’ll actually commit suicide.” As someone who once drafted a suicide manifesto, I felt appropriately challenged by his argument against an end to it all, signing off for a final time, calling it kaput:

You have to be in very, very desperate straits, but your answer under those conditions is that being is such that it would be better if it had never been. I think that’s a terribly philosophy… I think what happens if you act it out is that you make the very things that led you to despair far worse […] the answer can’t be to produce more suffering. (my emphasis)

That resonated with me a great deal, the argument that the antidote to suffering can’t be more suffering. Through the rest of the talk, Peterson gets to a better counter to the suicide solution: to actively work against the world’s suffering.

That hits right at my motivation for writing about trauma in the first place even though of course I’m supposed to stay in my lane, right, and stick to writing about plants. It’s my answer to the deep pain of parental betrayal and to the suffering that betrayal caused me.

I used to think the best revenge when you’ve been horribly wronged is a life well-lived. But this was never enough, somehow. Chasing success and material comforts wasn’t sufficient to work against my family trauma. You can’t fill the pit of despair with foodie experiences or a tech job with a view of the Olympic mountains from your office desk.

I’ve had to redefine a life well lived as one that counters the pain in the world through love and connection instead. That starts with your first circle, your family—maybe not the one you were born into, if that’s the source of your trauma as it was for me, but the one you create, the one you make yourself.

I’m now extending that sphere outward in the same spirit Peterson argues, to actively work against the suffering of children that carries into adulthood. I aim to use my God-given talents to help others heal the way I have, to learn from my experiences as both victim and survivor over more than half a century of handling the crimes committed against me when I had no control.

How do you work against the suffering in the world? Does gardening help you do that? Is gardening just for you—or do you share it with others?

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If you’ll indulge me in another survey, I’d also like to know more about this suicide thing. Survey results are anonymous; there’s no way for me to tell which answer is yours; all I get is the same numerical results you see.

I would answer the above, “Sometimes.” Fortunately for me, I’ve never gone as far as to attempt it. I sympathize deeply with those who have, and with the loved ones who suffered the pain and loss of their choice.

If you were paying attention to my subhead on this post, you might be wondering about half of us looking to Jesus for guidance. That was from another survey question:

Have to say that result surprised me, even more than the trauma percentage. It’s encouraging, though, since my next two posts heavily reference the Bible. The first one is about the Genesis story of Joseph, and I’m really curious to see how you respond to it. Though written more than 3,500 years ago, Joseph’s tale exemplifies some of the best aspects of modern trauma psychology: resilience, healthy boundary setting, putting a name to the crimes, acknowledging victimization, reframing, and finally, finding meaning in human suffering.

Look for that post on June 11, as I’ve committed to a biweekly cadence for the rest of the year. I also hope you’ll join me in the chat in the meantime for a casual conversation.

You can always ask me for advice in the chat, too. As a self-taught gardening know-it-all, I feel a sense of hard-won pride when people ask me for advice, and that’s already happened twice this spring. First, my neighbor asked me what she could plant in the shade near her house, so I turned her onto our native Hydrangea arborescens, which is hardier than the typical hydrangeas sold at big-box stores and does a better job of feeding insects and wildlife. Then the aforementioned brother Jason sought my advice on what to plant in the southeast corner of his home, where he needs a hardy plant to trail over a brick planter. I offered another native, purple poppy mallow.

For a reminder of the Brunette Gardens membership tiers or to share what this is all about with friends, check out the welcome page.

What’s your take on the survey results?

One thing I’ve learned in my “healing journey” (a phrase I used to hate) is that you should take a break before you get to the breaking point, not at it. And if you wait till after, well, that’s not a break. That’s recovery.

I’m doing great right now! All things considered. So it’s time for a break, one that I will actually enjoy.

Since returning to this Substack in January, I have survived coming out as a survivor of childhood rape and sexual assault, which could’ve been like a whole other trauma of its own. Sometimes it kinda was, honestly. But I’ve persevered.

Here’s what’s new in my life these days:

• New friends, healthy people who want what’s best for me

• Reconnections with old friends, including my one-and-only high school boyfriend and a girlhood bestie I had to leave in 1979 when my family moved

• Fewer family relationships, but they’re more authentic

• A practiced awareness in both boundary setting and pacing

• A powerful walk with God

That last one is huge for me, and maybe it is for you as well.

If talk about God puts you off, feel free to reconsider whether Brunette Gardens is for you. I’ve recently been drafting some essays in a new vein, using the Bible as a tremendous resource for healing from trauma. I’ll post a couple of pieces coming up in June that offer a deep dive on Genesis (boundary setting and the meaning of suffering in Joseph’s story) and Exodus (that pesky matter of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart).

I’d like you to give these a chance, as I’m still engaging with the Bible as me, the writer you seem to have tolerated just fine otherwise all this time—even after the big coming out about my childhood trauma. But by all means, if you find religion too “triggering,” somehow even more so than frank talk about sexual brutality, feel free to bypass those pieces, or get out now while the gettin’s good.

Who knows where else this walk will take me, and how that will shape my writing? I understand the Bible is full of gardening and farming wisdom… 🌱 🙏

After a year now in this small town, we have the beginnings of a garden, including 12 native plants, two apple trees, and 21 perennial herbs and flowers successfully transplanted from the old place. Shout out to my brother Jason for helping us with the transplants last June. Here’s how it all came together this spring.

I look forward to picking back up with you next month. In the meantime, though, I’d like to learn more about you, so please take this survey.

Pick your best option for each:

If you’d like to elaborate on your answers, hit the button below. If you’re reading the email newsletter, it will take you to the web or app version, if you’ve downloaded the app.

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Have a lovely time while I’m away, and I wish you the best in your gardening pursuits, your healing journey (still kinda cringe at that phrase), and your walk with the divine, wherever that takes you.

Maybe this book of poetry is just what you need right now.

Broom of Anger

It was the first time in five years straight that I hadn’t. In May, my husband and I pulled up tent stakes and moved, so a garden wasn’t possible.

But it wasn’t just the move that caused me to take a gardening pause.

Truth is, I felt burnt out and broken. Over the past three years:

• I had to let three terrific young people plus my own husband go from the business we all worked in together—in the same season that my cousin died.

• Most of my chickens (nine out of 15), two pear trees, and one witch hazel perished.

• My husband was fired from a university for voting for the “wrong” candidate, and then his own father tried to blame and shame him instead of supporting him.

• As a necessary part of brain retraining to cure myself of an autoimmune condition, I had to confront deeply traumatic childhood memories, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in a lifetime of healing.

• My husband and I managed a major relocation, selling our city homestead and moving to a rural small town.

• I worked with law enforcement to try to put my perpetrator in jail, and we failed.

• My youngest brother and I were both scapegoated and rejected by the rest of our birth family for refusing to uphold lies and unhealthy patterns.

• I contemplated suicide.

• Just when my husband and I thought we’d walked through all the fires there were to walk through, our son was deployed to support Operation Epic Fury in Iran.

Yeah, just all that.

I realize it’s a hefty list. I could write a whole post on each bullet point. Maybe even a book.

2023 said, “I’m the year of dying,” remember?

2024 came along, looked at ‘23, and said, “Hold my beer.”

2025 rolled up, scoffed at the other two, and said, “You two are just posers. Watch this.”

When you’re going through hard times, the things you thought you loved can become more of a burden than a solace.

That’s how gardening started to feel for me.

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever want to try growing plants again… but I hung onto the hope of it. That’s why the new home we’ve moved to has an ample yard, a bit larger than the quarter-acre city plot we’d tended for the previous eight years.

But this new garden… it’s going to take its time.

I’m trying raised beds now, partly because the land slopes and partly because I’m feeling my mid-fifties more than ever and welcome a bit of height so I don’t have to stoop so far down.

I prepped the beds last fall with hugelkultur limbs. My husband and I shoveled soil out from around our walkout basement, where water pooled, depositing dirt in the screen-door track, always a fun time. That soil went on top of the limbs. I layered straw over it, my own take on lasagne-gardening.

We’ve done hugels before, a highly successful herb-mound fed by decaying logs, and assorted limbs placed under our annual veg patch.

Thrillingly, the three beds I prepped this way last fall are full of worms now. At the end of March, I sowed lettuce, radish, and carrot seeds. For our hot, humid temps and clay soils, I chose Parris Island Cos, a romaine lettuce from Baker Creek Seeds and New Kuroda carrots, a blocky type I’ve grown for years. The radish I picked up from our new library’s free seed bank, and the variety wasn’t noted.

I used to keep a rather complex spreadsheet as a garden log, but now I’ve simplified with a visual version. You can see three small raised beds, an asparagus patch, a raised bed shaped like a keyhole, and the last bed in the upper left.

Here’s what that looks like in real life.

It’s still on that spreadsheet, but the asparagus I crudely transplanted from the old place has sadly refused to send up spears this spring. A moment of silence for the asparagus….

Mostly what we’ve been doing is addressing a drainage problem. I’ll get into that in a separate post I could title “A River Runs Through It.” 😂 We’re working on a wet/dry creek-and-pond solution—when we’re not mowing and string trimming. My people call that “weed-whacking,” by the way.

I first realized I’d hit a wall with my city-homesteading obsession two years ago, when I said,

This is our seventh year here, and I have been feeling ambivalent about the garden. Usually by now, just a week before spring’s official start date, I’ve got stacks of seed packets labeled for “spring cool” or “warm” season or “fall cool.” My garden-planning spreadsheet is normally up-to-date, the garden itself tidily waiting. The chicks had been ordered by this time last year, the garden tour dates set.

But not so here in 2024. There have been delays, hemming and hawing, a call to a landscaper about putting in paths… possibly. A subtle question whether we should keep doing this at all.

We will, though. We will. Despite age advancing in the form of greater aches and pains, an increased sensitivity to things we once met with ease, like the clock change for Daylight Savings. The insomnia struggle is real.

In that post, I went on to update you with my spring gardening plans. But now, two years later, after what in the tabletop gaming world we call a “board wipe,” I’m sitting here trying to figure out what I’ll actually bring back in.

The sourdough starter I hadn’t fed in a year failed to reactivate after three full days. Just a few minutes’ drive from my house—I could actually walk there, but I don’t because there are no sidewalks on old country roads—a homesteader sells delicious sourdough baked goods for Saturday pickup.

…So maybe not sourdough? …Really? I practically wrote a book on it, with recipes for how to start a culture and make sourdough cranberry-oat bars, along with deep dives on topics such as the pre-ferment and why fermented grains are better for you in the first place.

I do miss kneading dough, a decidedly somatic exercise, and very soothing.

But there’s that wet/dry creek, which needs to be filled with water-loving shade plants.

And the ash tree—remember I mentioned it was infested with emerald ash borer. When a crew came in and yanked it out, they left a big empty spot in the front yard. We’ve added two apple trees: A semi-dwarf CrimsonCrisp red apple and dwarf Ginger Gold yellow apple, both from Stark Bros., a Missouri nursery I’ve written about previously. Maybe a ground cover instead of grass. The front yard is south-facing.

As I said on Notes, I thought I’d plant huckleberries with them, but I accidentally ordered the evergreen variety, all wrong for my location. So those went in on the north side of our pole barn, where they have a better chance.

Anthony, my other half, makes kombucha, and for this I am deeply grateful. I don’t have to do anything, and kombucha shows up in my fridge. The mothers are taking over the shelf, like blobs threatening to devour our home.

He’s also fond of fashioning ferments, which doubly makes me a lucky gal. Once the farmer’s markets open again, we’ll get some cabbage for sauerkraut. Here’s our recipe for that, which you get in a 36-page PDF booklet with all our other recipes when you upgrade to a paid membership.

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We don’t grow it ourselves, as it requires a lot of space, and for some reason known only to cabbage, we haven’t had much success with it. Some plants are like that. Ditto potatoes. Anthony even bombed with a potato tower he tried in ‘24.

He’s not fond of gardening. I can hang out in the back forty with dirt between my fingers all the day long, but he gets testy if the work goes on too long. I’ve learned to press him into service only on specific, short-term tasks, usually the ones that require his manly muscles. He also needs to know the work leads to something useful or pleasurable, like a bunch of tasty, fresh carrots, or herbed sour cream.

I’m pretty strong, especially for my sex and size, but Anthony can shovel a load of mulch in a fraction of the time, and there are plenty of yard items I can’t lift at all that he can pick up like it’s nothing. Biological differences are real, and don’t spout off in the comments section about the chick you know who can deadlift 400, or the dude who can’t lift a finger. I’ve never been impressed by outliers.

What else gets jettisoned from the gardening plans?

We won’t be growing peas anymore even though they taste so good. They take up a lot of space, need to be trellised, and shelling makes them labor intensive.

Arugula bolts too easily in our climate, it turns out mustard is too spicy for regular eating, and Anthony doesn’t like Swiss chard enough to justify growing it.

Seeds for my spring plantings—lettuce, carrots, radishes—I sowed those directly into the soil, but now I have that little pole barn with electricity. Since our meddling indoor cat can’t get out there to dig them up, I could grow starts. That would require an investment in some grow lights, heating pads, and start kits. A decision for next year.

Tomatoes and basil are two plants you should grow yourself, for taste alone. They need to be started indoors where I live, so I need to either get with that barn plan or buy starts. Buying starts is always more expensive, of course.

But should I invest in a grow setup if I’m just starting tomatoes and basil? Probably not.

Cucumbers are a must: They actually prefer direct sowing, and there’s no pickle you can buy that beats the pickles you can ferment yourself.

In 2024 I discovered how easy it is to grow okra here. They’re prolific, tasty, less slimy if you grow them yourself, and besides, that slime is a demulcent that keeps your internal tissue-lining healthy. Okra, along with fenugreek, also helps your body remove microplastics.

I’m really not being paid by the okra board or anything. I just think they’re underrated.

Peppers and eggplant tease me with their promise, but they never seem to deliver.

I have a love/hate thing going with zucchini, as do most gardeners. If we could figure out how to get a seed packet with only three guaranteed-viable seeds in it…

I’ve been keen to try watermelon because you stick a tiny seed in the ground, and out comes a gargantuan piece of food, like magic!

But these and winter squash take up a lot of space. I’d have to let them wander far outside the raised beds… over the grass that needs to be mowed.

I fantasize about a moon arch covered in coral honeysuckle, trying edible natives like nannyberry and hawthorn, or growing grapes on the old metal-tube outdoor room we bought for the chickshaw. Maybe some currants. Should we grow elderberries again, or are they too much work to harvest?

At some ambitious moment last summer, I drafted out a plan for a strawberry patch. I look at that plan now and wonder why strawberries are so fussy.

When workers yanked the chain-link fence out, I told them to leave three poles behind, thinking I’d plant blackberries between them. But now I’m worried it’s too shady there, near an evergreen.

As for the writing… I’ve continued to write for games as a solo gig these past three years, and that’s been lonely… and weird… but a good income. I’ve kept at it even though I was technically burned out after those painful layoffs. I’ve been making a living as a game writer for twenty years, but this other writing calls to me… How does one heed the call, as the clock of time slowly ticks?

Since returning to Substack and shifting to more personal writing, my audience has both grown… and been pruned back. I’ve churned to a net neutral. I guess that’s something?

My life has as much certainty as this garden. How about yours?

Anthony’s retired now, as he’s ahead of me by some years. Being fired for his political views here in what we thought was still a free country was shocking, but we were prepared for it financially, at least, if not emotionally. Naw, he doesn’t want to sue and become the poster child for all that is wrong in academia. He’d rather make kombucha and sauerkraut and play games. He’ll soon start part-time work for our local library, a dream job.

Our son is a saving grace for us both, as the kid man approaches life with optimism, resilience, and abundant strength. He keeps telling us that the safest place to be in the Middle East is on his aircraft carrier but that his work in the Navy is seriously testing him. I think if he’s aware he’s being tested, he’s already passed the test.

Recently, I realized I was simply cycling through the stages of grief: denial/shock, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It makes sense; I felt as a child that I’d died, and some part of me did die when I was brutally hurt by my own parents. I’m walking the line between allowing anger and sadness and not getting swallowed by those feelings.

I’ll let you know when I get to acceptance and stay there. Maybe you’re already there, waiting for me. Or maybe you’re behind me on that journey, and you’ll take my offered hand. Either way, I wish you the best, in your garden and in life.

Why? Because I’ve really struggled to slough off the shame associated with being a victim of those crimes. I made the announcement only within the context of returning to this newsletter after a lapse and reiterating a stance on what constitutes a healthy diet, which as I argued, is not an unrelated topic…

I felt—and still feel—that writing about the deeply personal experience of childhood victimization carries risk, especially since writing is my livelihood. I’ve had to think about whether or not clients will trip across this material and hesitate to hire me—and if that’s a chance I’m willing to take.

So that was my professional concern, and then there are my personal ones. To be honest, I unsubscribed some family and friends from this Substack beforehand, as having them as subscribers felt at the least inhibiting to me and at the most, even dangerous. I reasoned it this way: I don’t show up to their workplaces and assert my presence there; conversely, I’m not writing for them here and never have been. If you’re part of my real life, I rather interact with you in person. And some of those people have already attempted to shame me for merely speaking the truth and seeking justice.

You can see how shame operates when it comes to crimes against children, especially when those crimes were left unaddressed and maybe even covered up and denied, as was the case for me.

Imagine if I’d had jewelry stolen. There’d be little shame in being the victim of that crime. Maybe some douchebag would ask in the comments if I had forgiven the thieves for stealing my jewelry even though they still walked free, and my jewelry had never been returned, and they certainly hadn’t apologized and asked for my forgiveness. But most people would express only sympathy for my jewelry loss and share in my desire to see the thieves brought to justice.

Potential clients wouldn’t even bat an eye; the jewelry theft would in fact be irrelevant to my ability to turn their game project into a bestselling, high-grossing title in the app stores, as I have done on many other projects.

A healthy family would lament the loss of the jewelry, especially any heirloom pieces, for their sentimental value alone, perhaps, something fellow family members would understand.

They wouldn’t reject the victim of the crime for speaking the truth of it.

See how we treat sex crimes—even against children—differently, and that’s the real shame here.

For all the doubling down some commenters resorted to in the below piece on forgiveness, it’s still my most popular post so far this year, and I think this double standard is why. Many victims of sex crimes have been brutalized by it.

Shame undergirds the feelings of wanting to die that plague trauma victims, too. In my second-most popular post this year, I talked about the shame of admitting a battle with suicide. It’s such a taboo subject, and here I went right to it in a year apparently devoted to taboo subjects!

It’s stunning to witness the way people react to these deeply uncomfortable aspects of human life: One commenter on that piece focused on how to cure the insomnia, as if suicidal feelings at 3 am are simply a matter of wakefulness, something that could be solved, by the way, by signing up for the qigong program she’d been on for just six weeks—not a reasonable test of long-term effectiveness. She even provided an affiliate link (which I deleted).

What she did was just another kind of avoidance—and a pretty tone-deaf one at that.

As I’ve said before:

No one wants to hear about heinous crimes committed against innocents. It’s “too triggering.” We look away, avoid, disengage, maybe even dissociate.

And that’s the last thing victims need.

The looking away, the avoidance—it’s what casts us all in shame.

As if the victim is the embodiment of the crime itself.

Almost as if she’s to blame for it.

Shame is such a powerful feeling that it can stay with us our whole lives.

It can remain buried, literally deep inside our bodies, where it tries to get our attention by manifesting as illness—autoimmune symptoms, to use my own example.

Even after we’ve cut ties with our perpetrator, setting a boundary they’re forbidden to cross.

Even after we’ve “moved on” and built good lives for ourselves despite a lack of justice or at least acknowledgment for what was done to us.

❤️‍🩹 How do we release shame?

I’ve found these methods to be most effective for extricating myself from its bounds1.

1. 👺 I recognize that it’s inherent in these types of crimes, which adults commit against children for precisely this reason: Shame is one of their manipulation tools. My father and my mother both tried to reposition the guilt for the crime right onto me. I was just a little girl at the time, at the mercy of my parents, so it was easy for them to do:

   • My father blamed me directly and lied to try to make me feel complicit in his crimes, to shift his own self-loathing over to me.

   • My mother denied my reports of the crimes, accusing me of making them up, even after she witnessed them with her own eyes, even after she cleaned up my father’s mess.

2. 👶 I’ve also found it useful to talk directly to the part of me who still feels ashamed. Known as “parts” work, this comes from the Integrated Family Systems therapeutic method. You locate within yourself this “part” of you, as not all of who you are feels ashamed, just that one part. You separate from her so that you might even “see” her in your imagination. You invite her to tell you how she feels, why she feels that way, and ask her what she needs to feel better. You listen and gently help her.

3. 🚓 For me, reporting the crimes to police and working with them to try to obtain justice helped immensely in lessening the shame. The police took my report seriously and did their best to investigate. Even though the hefty burden of proof means in my case the perpetrator still remains free, I feel I’ve done everything within my power to get a dangerous man off the streets and away from any future child victims. Through the process, I also confronted my perpetrator, naming his crimes, which had value in removing the sting of shame.

   • Setting boundaries can be difficult in families that enable sex crimes; going to the police is the most powerful boundary you can set. It’s the ultimate push back.

4. 🫶 Somatic work has been a godsend for me. This is body-centered meditation and brain-retraining: Rather than trying to transcend our bodies, we ground ourselves in awareness, feeling for our bodily sensations, needs, and even truths, as it can seem as if traumatic memories are physically trapped in the body. Other work I’ve done includes craniosacral therapy, somatic dance, yoga—even something as simple as singing in a church or school choir has been effective for me.

   • I would also put nature bathing in this category, as connecting with the non-built environment through hikes or gardening can restore what’s been lost via sexual violation.

5. 💬 I’ve done years of talk therapy, and that can be a powerful counter to shame. You speak the seemingly unspeakable and realize that the world has not in fact ended, that these things happened to you, not because of you. That’s priceless, and it can’t often come from anyone in your family or friend group. Sometimes, you need a professional who’s outside that sphere. I’ve also found it very helpful to talk with other sexual assault survivors in a group setting.

   • Caveat: I’ve found that therapy alone isn’t sufficient, especially for crimes against children that were suppressed and remained unacknowledged till adulthood. Therapy can also seriously backfire, for its built-in “expert” vs. “patient” power dynamic and the limitations of the therapist—sometimes serious failings.

6. 👀 EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is another tool I use to release shame, and it’s one I’ve been taught to conduct fully on my own, without needing a therapist present. Shame is often connected to deeply traumatic memories that need different kinds of processing, and that doesn’t have to mean verbally reliving them out loud with a “doctor” present. Men in particular may find this one to be more helpful than talk therapy.

Shame is insidious, and it can be lethal. But it can also be countered, lessened; it can be gently encouraged to dissipate, like a wisp of smoke.

You might like my book of poetry, a meditation on the role of anger in the healing process.

Broom of Anger

’s layered, complex compliment sent me searching around in the archive, and what I found over the past four years is a writer who’s slooooowly opened up to sharing more of her imperfections since launching this newsletter back in the fall of ‘22. Not just imperfections, but this winter when I came out as a victim of childhood rape and sexual assault, that required dredging around in deeply rooted shame, not at all fair for me to feel since I was the victim, but there all the same.

I offer the below as evidence of this evolution, plus it’s a roundup of hopefully helpful spring posts for those of you who are still gardening, or just like to read about it! 😉

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One of my most popular posts is about the tiny triumphs and hefty travails of attempting to homestead in the city—during the pandemic, the George Floyd riots, and an uptick in crime, including not one but several drive-by shootings.

The first of your baby greens might be shooting up out of the soil now, so maybe you feel like eating some salad. With this post, I wanted to empower you toward developing your own mad skills instead of relying on recipes from food influencers, after I got burned out comparing myself to elite food influencers, including a bad interaction with an orange-check salad bully on this very platform.

When you click on the above link, you’ll also see how you can grow more celery using the remnant of a supermarket stalk. That’s a cool trick to show your friends!

HOWEVER, if even growing and making your own salad sounds like too much work, you’re not alone.

You’ve never been alone in that regard, not here at Brunette Gardens.

Check out this post from two years ago for further evidence that I’ve never been perfect…

…unless being a perfect mess counts…

This is what my closet looks like right now. It’s been this way since last May.

Yeah, we’ve been literally living out of boxes for nearly a year now.

We bought the house thinking we’d take this odd, windowless former man cave at the back of the basement and make it into a walk-in closet. Unfortunately, the bids we’ve received from contractors put the cost of customized shelving between $12,000-$23,000. For a closet!

So, IKEA it is.

For more on the subject of my past imperfections, I give you this post from last March, which covers everything you ever wanted to know about trying and failing to free-range a small flock of hens in the city.

A lot of homesteaders these days are bringing in much-needed side income by selling their lifestyle to others online. There’s nothing wrong with that; more power to them; but the vast majority of their audiences simply cannot replicate their model.

I got sucked into Justin Rhodes’ chickshaw design when I was looking for a mobile coop I wouldn’t have to bend over to move and literally googled “mobile coop with high center of gravity” and got his.

I fell in love with it at first sight, but I was seriously deluded: It turned out to be a terrible option. You can read the gory details in that “folly” post.

Since writing “folly” and then moving to a rural area, I’ve befriended a local farmer who uses the chickshaw with electric fencing, just as I tried to do, and it’s successful for her. The differences are: She has a barn she can wheel the whole thing into on very cold nights, her homestead is much bigger than my 1/4-acre, so she can rotate the flock around to fresh forage, and she also has a separate henhouse. So she’s using it as a daytime-only pasture shelter, which as I’ve said is the only legitimate use for the chickshaw, something I finally figured out after three years of trial and error.

Compare “folly” to the first time I mentioned diving into animal husbandry, back in this post from spring 2023, where you can also see the chickshaw, brand spankin’ new.

By the way, I buried the lede on that post, a mistake I have often made over the four years I’ve been writing on Substack. I should have led with the chickens, right? Maybe that’s why this newsletter has always cost me money rather than made any?

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Also, I must be obsessed with witch hazel, or else out of original ideas, since I used it for my slug photo both in 2023 and 2024.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, and I have that well-oiled machine for self-criticism, so let’s shift gears… and thereby retrain our brains! One thing I’ve done well over the past four years is spread the love by bringing on plenty of other voices, whether interview, guest post, or podcast convo. I’ll close this post with two of my favorites, just right for spring.

This remarkable native blossom is one of my transplant success stories.

After a cold, dark winter, our eyes thrill to see the warm, sunny yellows of springtime.

Longtime readers know I can get a bit daffy about daffodils. As I said in this piece chronicling our former garden, they “put me back into that mode of feeling a rare joy to see them as winter gives way to spring.”

When this spring came, and I realized there wasn’t a single daffodil on our new .33-acre property, I felt the lack.

I’m not a naturally optimistic person; I have to work at it. That’s not exactly my fault, as trauma created a negative feedback loop that tends to flood my system with epinephrine—causing anxiety—and cortisol, which can make me grumpy or even angry. Survivors of serious trauma aren’t being stupid or stubborn when we seem to delve too quickly into the negative. We’re fighting ingrained neural pathways that trigger powerful chemicals.

And fight them, we can do. While I’m not to blame for the easy fall into grey-sky thinking, I don’t have to live that way. What I’ve learned after two solid years of brain retraining is that we can interrupt the negative feedback loops and create new pathways.

Sometimes all it takes is to notice and reframe.

That celandine poppy gave me the sunny boost I needed. I’d uprooted it as a transplant division last May when we moved and hoped it would take to the new location. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had.

I can look at it from my new home-office window, shining there like a beacon under a bald cypress tree.

Celandine poppy is such a vibrant saffron that Native Americans used it as a dye1.

A bush I hadn’t been able to positively ID last summer burst forth with unmistakeable flowers the same week explained how you could use forsythia petals in a fragrant, cold-busting tea. That sealed it: I have a thriving forsythia! To hit the coincidence with a third note, my husband had a cold, so I made him Anne’s tea.

My other successfully overwintered transplant: golden groundsel or Packera obovata. The jaunty little beauts emerge early and stick around all spring and summer, sending cheery yellow flowers up short stalks.

I felt much better once I noticed these three yellow blooms, allowing me to reframe the dearth of daffodils around a plethora of petals instead. Besides, I now have an excuse to pore over bulb catalogs for all those fancy daffodils I didn’t have room for in the old garden. You see, I really have to work to convince myself.

What I’ve done here is essentially a brain-retraining exercise. To recap:

1. First, I became aware of my negative thought pattern: oh, woe is me, no daffodils

2. Then I halted the thoughts: whoa, am I really self-pitying over daffodils?!

3. Next I questioned and reframed the narrative around them: missing the old garden and feeling the loss of it became the spark of a clean slate and new opportunity for beauty

4. Finally, I realized what I had and celebrated it: three bonny blooms like sunbursts

But I don’t want you to think it’s always this easy, or that this was just about flowers.

It never is, right?

All of my petal drama was a big, juicy stand-in for the loss of family and friends over the past two years, people who couldn’t come with me as I changed for the better, shedding old patterns, bad dynamics, and unhealthy coping mechanisms.

These were people who demanded I stay put, stuck, complying with their conditions for love or friendship, going along with their lack of boundaries, or upholding their demonstrably false narratives. They punished me when I refused, with first ill treatment and then outright rejection when that didn’t work.

It can be so hard to turn against all those unhealthy demands and expectations with people you love. You might even revert to them again without knowing, like a record needle stuck in a groove.

I’m a sap for some Coldplay, especially this apt song featuring the color in question.

For years “Yellow” was a repeat in my workplace playlists. I’d sit in my office pod, my ears nestled in noise-canceling headphones, gazing out at the watery deep of Puget Sound under gun-metal grey skies… while feeling mostly melancholy.

I thought the song only confirmed my gloom. I told myself it was about a guy who loved a super-skinny girl, as most of them do, of course, right? “You’re skin and bones/ set into something beautiful,” is how I heard it.

I’ve never been a super-skinny girl, and I used this as a way to feel bad about that.

I did have some help—from a mother who literally stuck a picture of Twiggy on our refrigerator for diet motivation. Also the guy who told me, “Did I hear you say you’re trying to slim down? What a great trend for you!” And two different guys I dated who flat-out stated they preferred “slender Asian women.”

The truth is, I’ve usually been average. Not underweight. But not overweight either.

The other truth—which I didn’t realize until I looked up the lyrics for this post—is that I got the song all wrong: It’s not “you’re skin and bones” but “your skin and bones.”

I used to teach the difference between you’re and your to underprepared college students. There are many examples of how correct grammar can save lives, and this is one more.

It’s a sweet song, actually:

I wrote a song for you
And all the things you do
And it was called, “Yellow”

So, then I took my turn
Oh, what a thing to have done
And it was all yellow

your skin, oh yeah, your skin, and bones
(Ooh) turn into something beautiful
(Ah) and you know, you know I love you so
You know I love you so

Those Coldplay guys weren’t fetishizing some anorexic chick like I cynically thought. Sometimes when we’re conditioned toward a negative outlook, we’ll see evidence to support that outlook even when it’s not really there.

That’s why repeating the brain-retraining steps is so necessary.

You can’t just “put on a happy face” or “give it a positive spin.”

It takes consistency, commitment, and most of all, repetition to ignore a well-worn groove and press into a new one. Those four steps above? Imagine you have seven of them total2, and you’re running through them about 50 times a day, with a lot of painful truths about where these negative thoughts came from in the first place surfacing for you to process and reframe as you go.

Brain-retraining—and the other work it prompted me to do—was harder than psychotherapy ever was, harder than the punishing 104° hot-yoga sessions I used to power through, harder than my divorce or having to lay off all of my employees or moving across country not once but several times.

But the most difficult challenges can give you the best results.

I’ve had to work through the stages of grief and am still working through them now, grieving the death of a child part of me and the death of the wish that my birth family could be made whole and the death of my own biological motherhood.

If I frame this in terms of faith, even going back to those 10 commandments these days most of us ignore, I can see that focusing on what you don’t have can easily push you into coveting what others possess. Social media platforms monetize mainly on that principle, making you compare yourself to others, feel your lack, and then envy your friends and influencers. That way you’re ripe for whatever advertisement the algorithm has targeted you to receive.

Simply practicing gratitude is a good way to counter all that, as it reframes just as I did in the garden. Instead of self-pitying over a dearth of daffodils, we revel in forsythia flowers, celandine poppies, and golden groundsel.

While it’s important for me to express the grief I feel over the loss of those friends and family who rejected the healthier me, I don’t want to stay in grief mode forever. I can look at those bonds that not only survived my changes but grew even stronger through the process, and to the new friends I’m making along the way, people who understand because they’ve been there, too.

My celandine poppy didn’t just survive the transplanting to the new home. It’s doing much better here. The conditions in the new garden are more suited to its needs.

When you’ve been the victim of heinous crimes that severely traumatize you, this can happen even after years of therapy. The 3 am brain gives you the raw version of your psyche, the part of you who took the burden of the traumatic experience, walling it off from the rest of you, the “normal” part. The 3 am brain doesn’t give a shit that you need your sleep in order to get up and do mundane things in the world; it’s still trying to cope with that heinous crime.

I got out of bed, which you’re supposed to do to counteract insomnia, teaching your brain that the bed is not a place to lie awake with spiraling thoughts. I drank some water, stared at the moon and stars in the dark sky, and then cued up a somatic meditation.

Forty minutes later, I was still spiraling.

Logically, I know suicide is not the answer. I’ve made all the arguments to others in this position. The one I’ve landed on most frequently says to find the small things in life that make it worth living until you can get to the bigger, more rewarding things. You start with the vibration from your cat’s purr when he’s snuggled up to your chest. Eventually that gets you to the feel of your husband’s hand in yours.

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But the 3 am brain can’t hear any of that. It makes a compelling case for the opposite, and the body supports that thesis with both physical and emotional pain. Suicide seems like the only way to make all the pain just fucking stop.

Feeling desperate, I reached out for help from two sources: 1) my brother Jason, and when he didn’t at first respond, 2) a suicide hotline.

Which one do you think did me any good?

Black-pilled as I am these days, I was actually surprised by how bad the hotline sources were, both of them. First, the website link from Google took me here.

I poked around and found a hotline that promised to put me in touch with a real human being via text. Here’s what I got after the sign-on prompt, which is HOME:

Now I answered the text frankly, and I ask you to remember this was my 3 am brain talking. (For the record, I’m fortunately not an alcoholic and never have been one.) Here’s what I got for answering the question, “What’s your crisis?”

Wow, eh? “Thanks for sharing?” Followed by more wait prompts? It was more than an hour before anyone texted an actual response to my answer.

That’s bad design.

Don’t ask what the crisis is if you can’t immediately and humanely respond to the answer.

It’s a good thing I heard from my brother by then instead. Here’s the end of my emergency flood to him, followed by his response.

Jason validated my experience—important since we’re both family scapegoats. The brotherly coffee poke is because I can’t drink it, and it’s his go-to, and he knows that.

The next thing he did was relate to my pain, in a way that was commiserating rather than competitive; he’s all “yeah, I have that issue, too,” instead of “my pain is worse than yours,” a response we both always get from our mother. Just hearing from him helped bring my filtering, moderating brain back online, and I bet the love between us activated some endorphins or serotonin or whatever feel-good chemicals I might have had left. That gave me the presence of mind to treat him as a true resource for ways I might respond to anxiety that I hadn’t considered, as well as express concern for his own pain.

As you can see below, the text hotline was still in auto-prompt mode, which gave us a moment of dark humor, something we both traffic in as a lifesaving coping mechanism.

By contrast, I found the entire exchange with “Maru,” who as I told my brother, couldn’t grammar, both useless and creepy.

“STOP” was the text opt-out command; it was the vaguely inappropriate and fake “I care for you” that put me off. And since I’d started the whole thread with a suicide complaint, I felt like the redundant question meant I was texting a bot even though the service had not copped to using AI.

You might rightfully ask why I didn’t call the phone number instead of texting.

There’s a lot of shame attached to suicidal thoughts, and voicing them to a stranger on the phone holds zero appeal. I also often feel (whether rightly or wrongly) that with text I retain more power, especially since as a writer I’m more comfortable with the written medium; whereas, I can often feel overridden, talked over, misunderstood, and even gaslit in verbal communication.

Texting of course has its drawbacks, as it’s hard to identify tone, and misreads are common. But I don’t think any of that made a difference with the text hotline.

Why didn’t I call my brother? I thought about it. Maybe he thought about phoning me, too. But sometimes written communication is less frightening, and even more intimate, as long as the two people texting have established a foundation of trust. He and I had spoken at length on the phone just the week before this, and it was a very good conversation, full of give-and-take and real understanding. So a text stream in the wee hours worked for us this time.

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I guess the text bot or whatever was just working down a response tree. The only effective aspect of that exchange was that I was able to put into words some of the pain I experienced. It was scary and freeing just to text about the trauma itself, especially since there are so few safe opportunities to do this in our society.

The bot took me through various resources, whether I had friends or family I could talk to, or had tried talking to a counselor. The fake sympathy backfired with me, though. By contrast, you know what my brother said? “I’m sorry that happened to you. I don’t know that that is something that will ever go away completely.”

It was empathetic, honest, and unhesitating. Along with validating the fact that both our family and the world as a whole is often full of darkness, he put my pain in proper perspective.

“That actually helped,” I texted him. “You should start your own hotline.”

He also sent me this.

Suicidal feelings often originate in the failures of forgiveness we discussed a few weeks ago. For victims of childhood abuse, our families can often:

• Cover up the truth through mandates to “forgive and forget.” This pushes victims like me to show the world our pain with suicide as the ultimate act, one our families simply cannot ignore or deny.

• Designate one or more scapegoats, members of the family who are blamed, shunned, or maligned, as my brother and I have been.

• Demand we carry the hurt and shame in the family as our sole burden. Our suicidal feelings are both a conditioned response and a desire to make the pain finally stop.

The way out of this for me has been to speak the truth and keep speaking it, with my voice and my written words. The alleviations and blessings that helped me survive my childhood are many, enough to fill a whole memoir, which I’ve finished. The healing balms of my adulthood are another story and have not just kept me alive but thriving.

I hope that I won’t ever want to end my life again. I realized I no longer felt death was an option when I thought of how my husband, son, and brother would react if they lost me too soon, and I could for the first time fully feel their loss and pain, instead of assuming the world would be better off without me. That was a huge shift for me, a blessing. I felt cast in God’s image.

I’m neither a therapist nor trained in crisis intervention, but perhaps together we can use the comment section to answer this question: What helps? When you feel overwhelming self-loathing or a need to communicate what has been silenced or a desire to end the pain—in those critical moments, What helps you most?

The fault was mine, not the driver’s, as I’m the one who blindly trusted the fog would simply envelop me in hope and love for a new day. Instead, as fogs often do, it obscured a dark force that doesn’t care about you, doesn’t see you, will barrel right through you if you get in its way.

As some of you know from my note, our kid was on the first carrier sent to the Middle East.

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So it’s been a rough couple of months. We were more tuned into what’s going on in Iran than most people because Zander was there before Operation Epic Fury even launched.

What we’ve seen since is astounding. It’s hard to imagine 1940s media broadcasting Hitler’s lies and propaganda as if they were fact, but our media parrots the Iranian regime’s claims as if we should take them at face value, as if they’re not part of the fog of war. As a journalist and democratic citizen, I believe in a free press, but we shouldn’t actively work on behalf of the enemy to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

Zander tells us he’s OK, that his carrier is the safest place in the Middle East.

Trolls on that note took offense at the pride I expressed for his Navy career. I’ve cropped out who they are because they don’t deserve the attention, but I’m sharing a couple examples because it’s important not to remain blind to bad behavior.

When I shared a subsequent note about tying a yellow ribbon around a tree for Zander, even more trolls descended. But maybe I don’t need to remind you how terrible people can be online, as you’ve likely experienced this for yourself.

Fortunately, the nearly 300 other people who responded to these posts were supportive; thank you again 🙏 if you were one of them. Between those expressions, the thoughts and prayers of the people in my real life, and my own strengthening connection with God, I felt a calm descend upon me. Hearing from Zander in the midst of it all that he’s OK was a blessing.

Another balm these days is a new friend, a homesteader. She taught me how to milk, and together we milk her cows by hand once a week. I don’t have any pictures of her cows—Belle and Bessie—to show you because I think it would be obnoxious of me to turn our time together into a photo shoot. Belle, the one I milk, is what my friend calls “a children’s storybook cow,” with curving horns, big brown eyes, and thick lashes. I milk her right into a pail, and I’m not bad at it for an aging former city slicker. I take this milk home to drink, still warm and steaming, and it’s the best-tasting milk I’ve ever had.

I don’t think I’ve quoted Biblical scripture even once before in my 35 years as a writer, but here we go. I’m attending a Christian church for the first time, too, at least the first time of my own choosing. The pastor recently referred to this verse from the book of John, and it’s perfect:

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. (15:1-2)

Think about that: God takes away the branches that bear no fruit, and even those that do produce fruit get pruned, so they will bear even more fruit.

Once my husband and I decided we wanted to return to a small town to live, it still took us six years to make the move. One of the reasons was my worry that we wouldn’t have access to the right food. By right, I mean fresh vegetables and fruit, preferably organic, and pasture-raised animal products, preferably regenerative. Even when we finally made the move last May, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to match the network of farmer’s markets, buying clubs, and strategic Whole Foods Paycheck purchases I’d built to put food on our table.

But here I am, less than a year later, with something much better—and simpler—than all that. So the pruning has borne more fruit.

Belle likes it when I scratch under her neck, but I don’t reach over her horns, heeding my friend’s warning. Cows aren’t really pets, though Belle moos a loud greeting as soon as she sees my truck headed down the drive. Maybe that’s because she likes me, or maybe it’s because she knows I’m there to relieve her of her burden. Cows make more milk than their calves can drink; they’ve been bred toward that for millennia, and indeed, milk and our tolerance for drinking it were game changers in human evolution and probably the basis for civilization itself.

My husband can only drink this raw milk, as pasteurized no longer contains the enzymes he needs to digest it.

My friend and I talk while we milk, the rhythm of our work providing an oasis for sharing. A truly safe space, if you will. With chickens wandering by, a dog aptly named Bandit often slips in to lap up spilt milk. One of my friend’s homeschooled kids will show up with a bottle to feed the new lambs. Their mother, Fizz, is suffering worms despite all attempts to heal her and not producing milk for her lambs, so they must be bottle fed. I do have this one picture of them that my husband took the week they were born.

This is one of three farms we visit to purchase food in our new rural community, where we’re closer to the source.

At another one, I’ve been regularly buying sourdough bread, as it’s been yet another tough year. This time I’ve walked through the fire of difficult truths and tried in vain to get justice. And I survived a major relocation in the midst of that; sometimes a tree needs to be pruned back aggressively! So I’ve been buying bread made by this farmer’s hands instead of my own even though I have a whole catalog history on sourdough right here at Brunette Gardens.

When the temperature climbed into the balmy 70s in March, I tried to reactivate my sourdough, to no avail. It had been a year since I’d fed it. You really can’t neglect the needs of a living thing—a lesson from my childhood writ large.

With all that spring milk, and the eggs from my friend’s chickens, I made strawberry ice cream. Maybe I’ll share that recipe with you if you like—let me know in the comments.

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For now, though, I’m thinking of planting carrots in one of these raised beds, which I scored for free from our agricultural extension office. They’re repurposed shipping crates.

You can see I added logs to the beds, to create a hugelkultur inside them. The logs will decompose, feeding the soil and whatever I plant in the bed. Perhaps carrots. As I mentioned in this—one of my first Brunette Gardens posts from four years ago—a blocky variety will work best in our clay soil.

But maybe with a raised bed and my lasagne layers of decomposing logs and hay mixed in with the soil, in addition to some cow manure from my friend’s farm, I could try one of those fancy varieties that are longer and thinner, like ‘Cosmic purple.’ A reader on Notes suggested ‘Black nebula,’ which to me sounds like a carrot poem.

That mess behind the raised beds in the photo above is my rescued asparagus.

When we moved last year, my husband, brother, and I dug up the asparagus, as it’s a perennial that will keep you in spears for as many as thirty years. I touted its benefits in another early post.

I replanted it last fall after it sat all summer in pots, waiting for me to recover not just from moving but from experiencing what felt like fresh trauma. When traumatic memories—ones your mind buried because you couldn’t possibly comprehend what you experienced as a small child—fully resurface, it doesn’t matter if it’s been decades since the traumas occurred. You’ll feel it all as if it just happened.

The asparagus bed has been wintering under a layer of hay and hasn’t produced any spears yet. I hope it will. I’m grateful for , who assured me it was possible when I asked her about digging up and transplanting established asparagus. But this is not a blind hope, as the crowns sat in those pots over a drought summer before I finally found a new home for them. It’s likely they didn’t make it, and I’ll have to start over, which will mean waiting another three years for a new bed to mature.

So many living things we left behind: apple, plum, persimmon, and serviceberry trees; three kinds of mint; aster and echinacea and valerian, just to name a few of the more than 100 trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, and herbs we planted over eight years in the old place. We dug up as much as we could transplant, and it’s still too early to tell what all has survived in the new garden and what has not.

The same week Operation Epic Fury launched, we got the news that the mature white ash tree in our new front yard is diseased. It’s infected with emerald ash borer and was planted too shallowly, its roots exposed so that the tree will quickly weaken and become unstable.

I love this tree, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to buy the house, for this beautiful white ash giving valuable shade on the south-facing side in the summertime. But it’s good for me to come out of my blindness to its diseased state. It’s likely to be gutted by the borer in as little as three years’ time and topple onto our house. The experts strongly recommend removal, not just to save our house but to prevent the ash borer from spreading to neighboring trees.

Likewise, back at my friend’s farm, poor Fizz might need to be culled, for the health of the sheep herd, as you need mothers who are able to feed their young.

We can’t blindly assume all will be well, that all things will grow and bear fruit. We need to look, and see, and prune. Pruning is a cut, a violence. It hurts to lose a cherished tree, or to leave an established garden, or to cull a sheep you’ve named and rubbed on the nose and thought of as part of your own flock.

It hurts even more to prune back in our human relationships, whether abusive family or friends. While it can be relatively easy to block an online troll or unsubscribe from a newsletter whose writer disappoints you, it’s a lot harder to excise a diseased branch of your own family tree, or trim out the dead wood in a relationship that’s holding you back from new, healthy growth.

When I hit the gas in my shiny new Scion that day, exiting out of my boyfriend’s parking lot and into the fog, the resulting T-bone crash was a cut, a necessary pruning. The man whose house I’d just left didn’t wanted to be my emergency contact—not that day or any other. He never even came out to check on me. I brushed off the broken glass and walked back to his door, where he told me to return to my vehicle and wait for the ambulance to arrive, alone.

I was still sitting there by myself when they came to put me on a stretcher.

Our relationship ended that day, not just our romantic one, but the friendship at its base as well because friends don’t leave you alone like that.

Pruning that diseased branch led to healthy new growth: I met my husband not long afterward. That was sixteen years ago. Our marriage has born fruit and will continue to bear fruit all the rest of our days.

Have you likewise been pruned recently? Or do you have any branches that need removing?

“But what have you forgiven them for?” I asked. There had never been any real acknowledgment of the serious crimes committed in our family, only vaguely admitted victim accounts, interspersed between avoidance and estrangement.

“You know, everything,” she said, still unable to name the crimes after four decades have passed since they were committed.

I’m using the word crimes literally and not metaphorically.

Let me name the ones our father committed: rape of a minor; sexual assault of a minor; aggravated sexual assault of a minor; molestation of a child; violent sexual assault; continuous sexual abuse of a child; and aggravated sexual assault of a child, multiple victims. Then there are our mother’s crimes of neglect, which the law specifies as “permitting sexual abuse of a child” and “failure to report sexual abuse of a child.”

These are all statutory crimes—acts that we as a society have agreed are not to be tolerated because allowing them destroys the health and safety of our most vulnerable members, which undermines the health and safety of our society as a whole.

Are you still with me here, or have you already checked out? I didn’t paste a trigger warning at the top of this post because they don’t help anyone—except perpetrators of crime.

But I don’t blame you if you checked out. Maybe you’ve already left this post. There was a time when I would’ve done the same.

I have deep compassion for my sister. I understand why she can’t name the crimes. Why she’d hope with every fiber of her being that just forgiving our parents would make it all go away, like magic.

Neither parent has ever asked for forgiveness, in case you’re wondering about that.

Neither parent has ever even acknowledged these crimes, let alone answered for them.

It’s not that those two things are necessarily required in order to produce “forgiveness,” but absent them, what exactly does my sister’s forgiveness mean?

Here are two other women’s stories.

In What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, a book Oprah Winfrey co-authored with child psychologist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry, Oprah writes about the strained relationship she had with a mother who had not been there for her when she was growing up:

I was conflicted about our relationship up until the very end. The truth is, it wasn’t until I became successful that my mother started to show more interest in me […] I decided that one of the ways I could honor her would be to help care for her financially. I always made sure she had everything she needed in order to live a comfortable life, but there was never any real connection. I would say that the audience who watched me on television knew me better than my mother did.

When her mother was dying in a hospital, Oprah was finally able to “forgive” her. She offers her mother understanding for her failings, sympathizing due to the woman’s lack of education and opportunities at the time she was pregnant with Oprah. She thanks her mother for bringing her into the world instead of opting for abortion even though it meant a harder path. “You did the best you knew how to do—and that’s okay with me,” she tells her mother. “So you can leave now, knowing that it is well. It is well with my soul.”

It’s a great mercy, this understanding. Though unattributed, Oprah’s words “it is well with my soul” must have been borrowed from a well-known hymn with an amazing origin story, as referenced in the movie I Can Only Imagine 2.

This show of mercy didn’t require anything that would go against Oprah’s values and authenticity. The megastar had already told the story of her mother’s neglect, and she’d told it over and over again to millions of people on the world stage. It was part of Oprah’s core brand, in fact—to share her worst childhood moments in order to connect with an audience who might have their own, similar wounds.

By the time Oprah offered this mercy, her mother was on her death bed. So the hope that they could finally have a mother-daughter relationship that would give Oprah what she needed was dying there in the hospital bed. There was nothing left for Oprah to lose.

So was it really forgiveness she offered, or instead, acceptance?

I think it’s the latter: Acceptance that she could not go back in time and alter her mother’s choice. Acceptance that no matter how successful Oprah herself had become in life, she would never gain love and validation from her own mother.

The mercy Oprah offered came from a position of power. Oprah had already proved that she could gain love and validation from other sources—whether that was the love of a worldwide audience or the family and friends she chose as an adult or even her own ability to self-love. She had gained love and validation though her own mother failed to provide them when she was a child and continued to fail now that Oprah was, well, OPRAH.

With her mother gone for good, there was no sticky consideration of how to put this newfound acceptance into practice as real intimacy. This is key: It made no demands on Oprah other than that death-bed speech.

Likely a real relationship could not have been forged even if Oprah had come to a place where she could make this speech before her mother was terminal. I bet on a subconscious level, Oprah knew that, and knew it to the very end.

So offering mercy to her dying mother actually served Oprah well, as the enduring belief that they could somehow share a real connection—as opposed to their faux, financial one—finally died with her mother. I hope acceptance gave Oprah a needed release and that she doesn’t feel guilty for not coming to it earlier.

But to call it forgiveness seems… at the least, inaccurate, since it required so little of the forgiver but to simply share words of understanding in order to ease a dying woman’s transition.

I don’t mean to split linguistic hairs here, but it’s important to understand what we’re really talking about when we talk about forgiveness.

Now let’s turn to Erika Kirk, widow of the influential commentator Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated September 10, 2025.

Admirably, Erika took to the stage a mere 11 days after losing her husband and expressed forgiveness toward his killer.

By then, the alleged shooter had already been apprehended, with a surprising, dizzying swiftness.

The murder had taken place on the worldwide stage, with literally millions watching.

No one could deny what happened.

Or the senselessness of it, the injustice, the tragedy. A man—a loving husband, father, friend, and tireless crusader—cut down in the prime of his life. By what could only be evil, for it must be evil that fuels such acts of senseless depravity.

Evil carried out by a man who chose to act on it. To commit a heinous crime, the one we punish more severely than any other because it stands in defiance to all life: Murder is annihilation, the ultimate destruction.

Erika Kirk’s speech is very moving.

It’s also brilliant, inspiring, and even if you disagreed with everything Charlie Kirk did and said, I challenge you not to tear up, watching it.

At the end of her speech, she expresses forgiveness, and it’s hard won.

It obviously requires great strength and even pain to feel through it, to conjure enough love to blot out what could grow as bitterness in her heart if she didn’t make this effort. What transpires is a spiritual moment. I bet those in the audience felt something more akin to what one might feel in church, watching it, being a part of it.

Earlier in the speech, she exhorted women to “Guard your heart; everything you do flows through it.” And then she demonstrates this very thing with her profession of forgiveness.

Yeah, that’s right. Have you forgotten about the alleged murderer already, Tyler Robinson? He most certainly will get the death penalty.

Whether you disagree with capital punishment or not, Robinson’s crimes warrant it under current statute: aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and commission of a violent offense in the presence of a child.

It’s not like Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s organization that Erika now heads) is mobilizing its tremendous clout to try to prevent Robinson from receiving a conviction on all counts and a death-penalty sentence.

Nor should it:

That’s something therapists, self-help gurus, and Christians and other religious believers—all of us engaging in the talk of forgiveness—should keep in mind when we demand or push for it, or judge those who don’t feel it’s right or don’t see that it would help them to forgive—especially not in the midst of that dark vacuum, that airless place where heinous crimes go unpunished.

What if Charlie’s assassin had never been caught? Erika would have to move through her pain in the total absence of justice, a dark path to walk for any victim.

What if Charlie’s assassin had been caught, but due to some technicality or the limitations of the justice system, he walked free anyway? Imagine if prosecutors and Erika herself knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he was guilty, and confronted him with it, and he simply denied it. She would still crave justice and a just punishment, and maybe without those, she could still forgive, but it would again be a dark and difficult path for her to walk.

We as a society shouldn’t ask it either.

My father has never acknowledged his crimes, let alone atoned for them.

He’s also free to continue victimizing children if he gets the urge and opportunity.

His were the perfect crimes, with the victims his own dependent biological offspring, the crimes denied, covered up, enabled, and even literally cleaned up. So perfect, in fact, that some of his victims continue to not just maintain their silence but try to enforce it on the rest of us even though he’s no longer in our lives, demanding this acquiescence.

The shame he put into his victims is that powerful.

When I talked to him on the phone to try to get some closure after a thirty-year estrangement, he spun the same narrative he always has, which is to deny his crimes.

So I don’t know what forgiving him in this context means. It had no place in that conversation. I should volunteer to forgive him for crimes he insists he never committed?

As for my mother, I have always tried to see her with grace and mercy—from the very moment she stood in the doorway of my bedroom, bearing witness as my father raped me. She saw that, her husband brutalizing her own tiny little girl. Instead of intervening in that moment, she turned around and went back to bed.

When my mother failed me in that moment, I was broken. My self obliterated into separate parts, and one of these in a sense followed my mother back to her room to tuck her in, to take the place of responsibility, to be her mother when she couldn’t be mine.

For the past 18 months, my mother has refused to respond to my phone calls, emails, text messages, and mailed cards and letters. Two of my birthdays have gone by without a word from her. One day I ran into her at the pharmacy; she looked at me and then quickly turned away, as if to pretend she didn’t recognize me. This is her response to my simply speaking the truth.

Before her rejection of me, I’d been like Oprah but with far fewer resources, buying her cases of sardines when she needed fish oil in her diet and teaching her to make sauerkraut.

Unlike Oprah, I didn’t stop at the tangible gifts. I earnestly tried to forge a relationship, visiting for walks in the park or to take her on day trips or just to chat. Unfortunately, these were always one-sided experiences. I was and always had been cast as her therapist, listening to her either brag or complain without so much as a question about me and my life, my own family.

My mother had also put conditions on our relationship: I should never bring up Dad’s crimes, or her role in them. I could speak of my father only to sympathize with his brutal treatment of her in the context of upholding the narrative that she was his greatest victim, that she suffered more than any of her children ever had.

I defied those conditions, as a way forward in my own health. I began to speak to my family with truth and conviction, to name all of the crimes, including her neglect of not just me and my siblings but a neighbor’s child—yes, I’m sorry to say my own siblings and I were not the only victims. For this, she punished me with banishment.

I’ve always forgiven my mother and continue to offer her this mercy, though I can no longer uphold the conditions she puts on her love for me.

I have compassion for the children my parents once were and the crimes probably committed against them. I suspect those crimes—also denied and buried—eventually turned them into severely compromised adults.

Those adults willingly made and continue to make the wrong choices. We as a community need to hold them accountable because heinous crimes against innocent children are serious transgressions we cannot allow.

My father should absolutely pay for his crimes—to the fullest extent of the law. Whether or not I offer him the mercy of my forgiveness is up to me to make, on my own timeline, if I choose to do so. Or maybe acceptance is enough for me.

If he approached me with an apology, asking for forgiveness, I would tell him to turn himself in to the police, as the next step in atoning for what he did. We are long, long past the possibility of a relationship, as he long ago forfeited his right to father. He is a stranger to me who was only in my life for the first 20 years of it out of 50+, was thankfully away on tours of duty for at least five of those 20, and brutalized his family when he was home, covering all of it up with psychopathic, manipulative charm and lies.

My mother has already paid dearly for her crimes, I believe, over a lifetime of repeating destructive patterns, like a record stuck in a groove. I ask nothing more of her, and I forgive her for even the worst of it. Yes, even for turning away at my bedroom door, as I know she did not have it in her to do the right thing.

I suspect she’s been punishing herself for that failure ever since.

Here’s the thing: It’s not forgiveness my sister holds over my head like a cudgel of judgment, but compliance.

Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer was apprehended immediately, and he will stand trial. If he’s guilty, and the evidence says he is, he will pay, possibly with his life. Because the community has righteously stepped in to punish this wrong, Erika can now focus on the healing work left to her, and for her, forgiveness is part of that process, so that her grieving heart can mend instead of harden with bitterness.

It doesn’t look like Oprah’s mother’s failings were crimes by legal definition, but even so, Oprah tried and convicted her mother every time she took to national TV to tell her own story. The only work left was to accept a past she could not change and the reality that she’d never, ever get to experience her mother’s love. That hope had to be let go at last.

I’ve been reporting my father’s crimes all my life, beginning when I was a little girl, continuing in young adulthood when I first broke free of his grasp, and again when I was finally able to process the full force and detailed bodily experience of those crimes as part of my own work to heal.

The justice system sets a high bar. It’s called a burden for a reason, the burden of proof. Despite the strength of my own credible victim’s testimony and some corroboration from my family, he’s never been prosecuted because the surviving evidence simply isn’t enough to warrant an arrest.

Even though my father left my mother more than thirty years ago, she has never reported his crimes against her and refuses to do so now. She was not only not supportive in my own quest for justice but actively tried to undermine it. I believe that if he hadn’t left her, they’d still be married.

Self-help gurus like Jack Kornfield or even Oprah herself, who included it at the end of her story about her mother, like to say, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.”

But that’s never made much sense to me. Logically, we all know we can’t change the past since no one from the future has ever come back to let us know it’s possible! 😂 My future isn’t dependent on a different past anyway and never has been. The wounded little girl inside me doesn’t need to be stuck in the 1970s—I can let her know I’ve aged and lived and loved and not let those crimes hold me down.

It’s hard to let go of the desire to save your mother so that you can finally gain her love and validation, or to put your father in jail so your family and community can finally feel safe.

But I have to accept that neither of those things is in my grasp. I’ve now done everything I can do, everything in my power, to bring about justice and safety. The rest is out of my hands—and out of my control.

When justice and safety are denied, and forgiveness is too much to ask, fortunately, we still have acceptance. There, I fixed it: Acceptance is giving up all hope of a better past.

There’s a reason so many adults know this one by heart:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer

You might like this book of poetry themed on how nature, spirituality, and love can be healing balms.

Broom of Anger

In my previous post, I announced the reason why in 2025 we left our beloved city farmhouse:

Last May my husband and I finally permanently unplugged from our perennial city moorings and moved to a rural small town.

I also walked you through our s-l-o-w shift from loyal adherents to the urban myth to lovers of rural, small-town living:

This was a very good move for us and the culmination of a long transition out of our urban lifestyles to something better.

As evidence that this transition is a tough one to come to in today’s society—the majority of our pop culture narratives cut against it—I ended the post with the fact that we’d defected to a small town once before. Let me pick up my thread there: Anthony and I officially left Seattle in 2015, and our son, Zander, soon came to live with us full-time in our new home, in a town of less than 10,000.

That little rural burg made its mark on all three of us, and none of us would ever be the same again.

On our first visit to this town, which I’ll call Temperance, I thought it was a shithole.

Excuse my language, but that’s exactly what I called it.

The collapse of the coal industry that once powered it left Temperance reeling from the double blights of poverty and meth.

The rain in the Pacific Northwest, though gentle, is relentless. Constant sky spittle from September clear through June takes its toll, and in Temperance that meant house paint flaking off to reveal rotting wood. Blue tarps stretched in vain across drooping roofs. Rust, so much rust, on old pickup trucks and abandoned farm equipment and broken gates.

But Temperance had two things going for it.

First, unlike in Seattle, we could afford to buy a house there.

Second, the rural countryside offered quiet solace. Each time I returned from the four-hour round-trip trek to Seattle, I’d smile when I got to the sign saying, “Last rest area next 49 miles.”

Because that meant I was free of the city and its onslaught of harsh sights and sounds.

I could inhale… and slowly… exhale.

Something released in me then, something that had been submerged by concrete and asphalt all this time. What was it? A feeling, visceral. Not the abstract environmental conviction you forge as a concerned urbanite who hikes on the weekends but a real, authentic desire for connection with the natural world. Not as a precious thing separated and set off from most people but integrated and in harmony with humanity.

We moved to this small town and not a “better” one because Anthony had a job opportunity there. I could continue my tech job remotely. Zander could take a train from Seattle when we shared custody with his bio mom, but soon he came to live with us full-time.

That’s Zander’s story to tell, but I think my husband and I can now admit that we left that young man too soon. It came as a surprise to all of us, most of all Zander himself, but he still needed us, and he needed us closer than that train trip allowed.

All that said, Temperance was good for us as a family, for what it gave all three of us even if not a permanent home.

Zander received a crash course in just how good he’d had it as a child of three successful parents. While none of us were well off, we did all right, especially in comparison to the average person eking it out in Temperance. Zander’s peers had meth-addicted single moms and absentee fathers or just two parents who worked to the bone at shitty service jobs. While in Seattle, his friends’ parents tended to be office workers and consultants who could afford to pop for spendy gear for crew club or wrestling, his small-town friends came from families who’d never recovered after the coal mine shut down. Zander got perspective.

But more than that, I think he was genuinely happier in Temperance even though he’d had to forfeit his last high-school hurrah to live there. He was blessed with good friends who looped him into small-town experiences like “mudding.” While Seattle meant rap, graffiti crews, and marijuana—recently legalized and everywhere available all at once—his new life encompassed country music, chewing tobacco, county fairs, and lifted trucks. It was an entirely different culture.

He lived with two parents who still insisted on sitting down to dinner as a family. His father and I also learned to let him make his own mistakes and deal with the consequences rather than try to hold tight to what wasn’t ours to control.

Never had I felt more welcomed into a place than in Temperance. While Seattleites are famously called “the nicest people you’ll never get to know,” in Temperance, I connected swiftly and easily with people in the community. In short order, I was part of the “Bonfire Broads,” a group of women who gathered at a friend’s farm for fireside chats. I frequently went to breakfast or coffee with many of the ladies who danced with me at a local studio, and they invited me to their homes and farms.

As a writer, I had no trouble convincing the in-town book store to stock my mystery series and poetry chapbook. I found a group of serious writers who met regularly to critique drafts and encouraged each other rather than falling into jealousy or internecine battles, as I’ve experienced elsewhere.

It was a great place to live, in most aspects, as it turned out.

So you’re probably wondering why we ever left.

Anthony’s job opportunity turned out to be a case of bait-and-switch, and we would soon end up stranded in Temperance without viable incomes. My tech gig had also come to an end, and we couldn’t live on my book royalties and freelance pay.

As fate would have it, a chance came up for me to take a tenure-track position teaching game design at Webster University, back in St. Louis, Missouri, the city around which my birth family still lived.

After 17 years away from them, I’d longed for reconnection.

When Zander went away to college in 2017, Anthony and I moved to the Lou, as it’s called. What transpired after that, over the past now eight years, is a whole story of its own, especially as it reveals how long it takes—a lifetime, in fact—to undo the formidable damage of early childhood trauma.

And remember I told you last time that leaving Seattle allowed us to get Zander out of there just when he needed it, twice? The other time was for the year before he entered the Navy, when he came to live with us full-time again, at our old farmhouse in the Lou. It was punctuated by the collective pandemic madness, but even so, that was one of the happiest years of my life.

Nearly the whole eight years Anthony and I lived in the Lou, we worked out a plan to return to small-town living. Even before COVID, we began our research, visiting places we thought we might like to live.

I kept a spreadsheet ranking towns according to their safety scores, populations, whether or not they had access to farm-fresh food, and other criteria.

Working with four different realtors in five different counties, we toured homes in earnest from the onset of the pandemic until we finally settled on a new residence in May of last year.

We faced stiff competition in our lower-than-median price range. After being outbid three times, it finally took waiving inspections and a generous escalation clause to snag the right one.

Selling our World’s Fair-era beauty was easier, with multiple offers within the first week of listing. Our hard work was worth it!

Life is full of tradeoffs, of course. We downsized from a three-bedroom home to two and lost a dining room. Our new home boasts no period details like the transom windows, pocket doors, and copper knobs in the old house: It’s a 90s ranch home.

But what it doesn’t deliver in terms of architectural charm it makes up for in comfort and coziness, especially for a couple whose needs and desires have changed and continue to change with age.

We couldn’t be happier with our new small-town, rural community. I’m surprised to say it’s even surpassed our expectations. On that point I’ll have more to share in the future, but I’ll end this post with perhaps the best part of all…

We have more gardening space in the new place.

We went up from .19 to .33 acre!

I don’t know about you, but we didn’t even see that one coming. It happened by accident…

Up to the green fence in the background and including the pole barn (!) on the right, aaaaall of that is ours, even past those fence posts cutting across the yard on the left. That’s where we thought the property ended when we bought it, but it turns out the tree grove behind the fence was also ours.

It seems fitting to end this story about a transition from city life to country life with this observation:

Share Brunette Gardens

If you like this post, you might also enjoy my award-winning mystery series set in Seattle, about a family of detectives who solve crime using their ability to slip into other people’s dreams…

Book 1: Cat in the Flock

Book 2: Framed and Burning

Book 3: Bound to the Truth

Boxed Set: All 3 Books + Novella

I always wanted to be this carefree career woman, throwing her beret up into the air. Note the lead-up to that pinnacle moment shows Moore happily wandering those metropolitan streets, decidedly solitary. She might fall in line behind a group of school kids, but it’s just a temporary lark. She is herself unencumbered: child-free, single, the master of her own fate.

I thought true happiness was embodied in TV characters like hers, and so many others: Laverne & Shirley, Kate & Allie, Ann Romano on One Day at a Time, etc. Growing up in a criminally abusive home pushed me to get far away from the kinds of places where I’d lived as a kid—mostly satellite suburbs around Air Force bases. I wanted what these TV women had: rewarding careers and the freedom to live however I wished. I believed the only place to find all that was in the city.

Boy, was I wrong.

Last May my husband and I finally permanently unplugged from our perennial city moorings and moved to a rural small town.

At our old place, we’d walk down the street to a major thoroughfare overpass and an expansive strip mall. At the end of our block now is a vast farm field, the sun rising behind cornstalks on a summer’s morning.

Our former neighborhood was a 24/7 cacophony of ambulance and police sirens, constant steel crashing and creaking from the nearby intermodal station, and the guttural burp and moan of a major highway within glancing distance. Now we hear mostly quiet, but for the occasional barking dog or sounds of children at play.

This was a very good move for us and the culmination of a long transition out of our urban lifestyles to something actually better.

And it only took our entire adult lives to make it!

He’s no different than I am, my husband. I sought solace in Seattle and St. Louis while he poked around for the good life in Portland and San Francisco. He’d grown up in the smallish farming burg of Walla Walla (before the wine industry changed it) but left as soon as he could. Our friends, too, no matter whether we met them in the small towns where we went to high school or along the way, all ended up in metropolises: D.C., Chicago, L.A., New York.

It’s strange, isn’t it? This belief that city life trumps country life.

I finally did get it all, you know. The whole Mary Tyler Moore package. I remember the distinct moment I’d arrived.

By 2009, I lived in the top floor of an apartment building in Seattle, a nice place with a corner balcony—and for a time, at least, until new development blocked it—a view of the Olympic mountain range peeking above the hospital next door. I could walk to a 5-star sushi restaurant, a hot yoga studio, and a legendary music venue showcasing awesome new bands—before they went megafamous and were therefore still hip. I was single and would meet my other single friends at a bar where we’d order complex drinks with clever names like a ‘Judy Blooming’ with chamomile-infused vermouth and a laphroaig rinse.

For someone like me whose childhood trauma casts a long, dark shadow, this lifestyle seemed like a great victory. I wasn’t ever supposed to be successful, independent, financially secure, or even so much as healthy. My destiny should have been miserable failure. My primary function as a child had been to be used—by my father for his own perverse gratification and by my mother for her own gaping emotional needs.

But by then I’d completed years of psychotherapy and other interventions to reckon with recurring nightmares and sleep disturbances, negative beliefs, self-doubt, self-loathing, and a full range of medical conditions I now know are rooted in that early-life trauma. I’d also just ended an eleven-year marriage to a musician and artist who hadn’t wanted children; he just wasn’t into the idea of being a father—or a provider. Ours was a sometimes-healthy, often-not-healthy relationship—until it no longer was at all.

As a born-again single lady, I’d found good work funneling a talent for writing into something that actually paid for a change and began to dig out of the debt I still carried from years of low earnings and marriage to a downwardly mobile artiste. I’d assembled a group of girlfriends, of like mind in our appreciation for a certain brand of middle-aged urban sarcasm. I was out to enjoy everything Seattle had to offer.

But urban amusements can only get you so far. Even the most supposedly life-altering experiences—like that epicurean delight I imbibed at Canlis or the thrill of dancing along with David Byrne by the waters of Puget Sound—left me feeling a bit… empty?

Part of this was plain loneliness. There were long stretches when my friends were too busy with their own lives, and even in their company I’d feel it creep up. The loneliness came in waves of longing as I’d sit in a dark movie theater eating popcorn for dinner and watching children’s animated movies—not because I had kids of my own but for research, as I was gainfully employed writing stories for the video games they play.

You see, after all those years of mental health and somatic work, I could finally hear my biological clock, and it ticked loudly. But there I’d been, married to a man who was sort of like a child himself, such that I was the breadwinner and chief person of responsibility. I did want children—just not with him.

I was 37 when we parted. The window was closing fast. I at least knew better than to think that I could find the right person lickety-split for an insta-family, so I kept the pressure off the whole post-divorce dating thing to see what casually unfolded.

One guy flat-out told me he would not have children with a woman in her late 30s due to the risk that the child would be born with Down syndrome. As much as his declaration sucked to hear, it was valid: According to the The Menopause Society, children born to mothers older than 35 are more likely to have genetic disorders1.

Most other guys I dated were allergic to the very idea of children. I might as well have said I was a Christian and wanted us to go to church!

It was a long haul, that round of dating, with breaks in between to regroup. I learned a lot about myself, what my values were and what kind of relationship I desired, listing these in my journal. I approached dating in a much more conscious way this time than when I’d simply fallen for a mandolin player in a stairwell back in 1996.

Intention is everything. It seems to me that when you put something like this out there, the universe or God or whatever will listen. It just might not be literally what you asked for.

“Soon the ones you’re supposed to make a family with will be here,” a voice seemed to say. I felt their presence as a premonition. I actually heard the sound of their male laughter and talk reverberating through my large, sparsely furnished apartment before they even showed up.

Anthony and Zander.

What a pair! Anthony still had some growing up to do, but so did I. We thrilled to the size and shape of the luggage we brought into the relationship and then tried not to wince when we saw all of what was inside. The kid was eleven-going-on-eighteen and awkwardly tried to put the moves on me during our second family date.

“I’m pretty sure you’re going to break up with my dad and go out with me,” he announced.

“I’m sure that’s never going to happen,” I countered. “I’ll be sort of like a mother to you, but since you already have one of those, I’ll be another woman in your life you can think of in that way.”

Zander wasn’t actually trying to put the moves on me. He was testing the line, and as soon as I showed him where it was, he looked relieved, our relationship thereby established.

By comparison, I didn’t see this same move in one of Anthony’s longtime friends. My stepson tried the same ploy with her, and the woman actually flirted back. But hey, she drinks coffee like a long-haul trucker and prefers that look in her ladies as well, so no harm done, right?

Anthony, Zander, and I traipsed around Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, mining what they call “God’s country” for what we could do together as a family. From the jump, I liked to give the kid experiences that were rarer for Seattle, like setting off real fireworks or making popcorn in a pot instead of the microwave. His dad and I took Zander to his first concert (Alt-J before they got famous) and to a course on proper gun safety—idolizing rap stars, he’d become obsessed with gangsta gear. That last one might’ve saved his life, which is a story for another day, and his to tell.

When I weigh my own success as a stepmother, I see all of the above on the plus side, as distinctly my ideas and influence. Among other mistakes on the negative side, I often see this image: my two guys sitting in the lobby at Big Fish Games, waiting for me to get off work.

I wish now I had that time back.

But all the work? It paid off my hefty student loans and helped me and Anthony finally buy a house—just not in Seattle, and not so we could fill it with more awesome kids like Z.

Turning 40 the year we met, with Anthony at 47 and not inclined at that age toward another round of fatherhood, I had to let go of the dream of holding my own baby in my arms.

It’s a tragedy, a loss. I’ve written before about this milestone of getting to menopause and mourning the baby you never had.

We’d have made excellent parents and did, with Zander. One of our credits was to get him out of Seattle just when he needed it most, and not just once but twice.

Despite my tech gig and his father’s post-2008-crash rebound role as a grant administrator, we could not afford to buy a house in the Emerald City. The two of us were working our asses off in middle age, but home ownership meant taking on an enormous burden, and retirement looked impossible either way.

What’s more: Anthony and I both individually and then as a team saw where Seattle was heading, and it wasn’t good.

Anthony had predicted the 2008 crash, and being right about that cast other presumptions into question. I noticed that our own Generation X wasn’t doing as well on average as our parents’ generation, and the shift traced back to the very year of my birth, as exemplified by a sobering, illuminating collection of graphs to illustrate the point called WTF Happened In 1971?

I started this Substack back in 2022 with a whole breakdown of the limits to growth behind our civilizational decline in a series called Slowpocalypse, and that’s part of the picture for us. Seattle had changed dramatically in the decade we’d called it home, and not for the better. It was more dangerous, more expensive, and much less diverse, ideologically speaking, in 2015 than it had been in 2005.

Six months after our wedding, we left.

Here’s the love letter I wrote to say goodbye to the city I’d lived in and loved in for a decade.

Where did we go?

We moved to a small town.

That’s right.

We’ve done this before!

It just didn’t… fully take that first time.

We’re both a bit thickheaded when it comes to the urban lifestyle myth. Call it a symptom of Generation X.

I’ll pick up here next time.

By the way, I recently mentioned removing a reader comment, and I now regret that decision, as discussed in the chat. What do you think?

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy my award-winning mystery series set in Seattle, about a family of detectives who solve crime using their ability to slip into other people’s dreams…

Book 1: Cat in the Flock

Book 2: Framed and Burning

Book 3: Bound to the Truth

Boxed Set: All 3 Books + Novella

Here’s the opening as an excerpt:

This past year seemed to have taken up dying as its prevailing theme, at least here at our house. The business I launched eight years ago and grew to employ six writers at our peak is slowly dying. A company is not a person. But a small, family business, as ours was, has a life of its own, and when the people who made it what it is are let go, the death is palpable. We wrote dialogue for video-game characters for a living. Our voice actors gave each character speech. The laughter we shared on table reads, the spirit we breathed into tiny screen images—those had an energy, and that energy has now gone cold and dark. Dormant, like the earth in winter.

The business of dying, too, is serious. My cousin Joel was dying of cancer. He and his wife kept birds, and in the final weeks of his life he requested the birds be homed elsewhere so that he could die in quiet. It takes concentration and effort to leave this world, as I have seen in other people who are dying. My husband’s mother, when she left, had to work at it. It took everything she had to die.

You can read the rest in County Highway, available via subscription. Consider subscribing, as it’s a fine publication; it’s an honor to be a contributor. I’ve subscribed since the summer 2023 launch and read every issue. The writing tends to stay with me; for example, a while back they published a long-form piece about how President Donald Trump draws heavily on what’s known in the wrestling world as a kayfabe, and ever since then, I view his actions through that lens.

Another County Highway article that affected me was a thorough examination of the Taylor Swift phenomenon, and that was a hard sell since I am apparently the last woman in America who isn’t a fan. One of my former employees treated our team to a full week of Taylor Swift song references as part of a game we played to keep up morale—not even that could win me over, but the essay in County Highway made me appreciate the megastar’s business savvy.

I originally found County Highway, AKA “America’s Only Newspaper,” via , who mentioned it on his Substack and during a podcast with Kirn. That was during the height of the Covid lockdowns, and County Highway gave me hope during a difficult time. From their own editor’s note:

Some of us fear the specter of an incipient totalitarianism emerging from our laptops and iPhones. Some of us are simply allergic to conformity and brand-names. What we share in common is a revulsion at the smugness, sterility, and shitty aesthetics of the culture being forced upon us by monopoly tech platforms and corporate media, and a desire to make something better. We encourage you to think of our publication as a kind of hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic “content” that you scroll through every morning, most of which is produced by robots.

This is the second Brunette Gardens piece to find a home outside Substack. GreenPrints magazine published “Losing the lucky frog” two years ago.

Some writing I did for Missouri Conservationist and Chickens magazine didn’t start out on Substack, though it could easily have.

But maybe I didn’t need to list these publications for you. Maybe you’re here for my words and don’t need anyone else to legitimize the experience for you.

My apologies if I’m trying too hard to make you like me. It’s one of the legacies of a childhood marked by trauma. I catch myself here wanting to remind you of the way I have thrived in my career, how good I am so you won’t look at me with eyes of shame for the horrors I still carry in my memory and in my body.

Coming out to readers in my last post as a survivor of childhood sexual assault and rape was the riskiest moment of my career. But you know what?

You really surprised me.

My own family members—with the notable exceptions of my husband, son, and youngest brother—have met me with rage, condemnation, and demands that I immediately forgive the criminals who hurt me. “Just get over it,” my mother says, while also insisting that she is the one who’s suffered the most, like suffering is an Olympic event. “No one has suffered more than I have except Christ himself.”

Yeah. Direct quote, that one.

So when you wrote comments of support and appropriately asked if the perpetrators had been punished for their crimes, I was deeply relieved.

There was only one bad comment, from someone who posted an angry tirade about how dare I praise the Trump Administration’s new food guidelines when Trump is a sexual predator and on and on. Her rant was off-topic and felt abusive to me in my vulnerable moment of having just revealed a secret I’ve kept close to the vest for decades, so I removed it. But maybe I should have left it for the prime example of what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome that it was. I haven’t set a comment policy here on Substack yet. I’m against censorship, haven’t had any comment problems until now, and that’s the first time I’ve removed anything other than spam links to pro-Palestinian fundraising sites. But I realized I do have a line, and that reader crossed it.

I wish I could say I was surprised to hear that the reason many of you sympathize with me is because of your own experiences of child abuse, but sadly, this doesn’t at all surprise me. Back when I served as deputy editor at Crosscut, part of my job was to scan the morning news for links, and the sheer number of daily child-abuse cases—most of the perpetrators family members—was a matter of dark reality. I’m painfully aware I’m not unique in this experience, and please know that I’m with all of you, every day and with every breath.

Whether you can commiserate on the basis of first-hand experience or not, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your understanding, your empathy and well wishes, and your pledges to stick with me on this journey.

Now for some membership housekeeping

In returning to Brunette Gardens after nearly half a year away, I discovered that the link to my companion-planting guide was broken. The guide is supposed to be a free gift to anyone who signs up for this newsletter, so I’m sorry to all of you who joined and got a broken link. Here’s one that works!

The membership tiers remain the same as when I pivoted more directly toward the trauma theme last year. Here they are for reference.

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In the time I’ve been away, a lot has transpired. I last left you hanging with the story of our move and the bittersweet sadness of leaving the place I’d lived in for the longest stretch of my life:

She’s a hard friend to say goodbye to, this home. I’m not ashamed to say I hugged that stairwell newel post and blew her kisses as I closed the back door for the last time.

Though she’s 121 now, she told me she felt prettier than she ever has, and thanked me for all the attention and care.

Though I’m in my fifties now, I told her I’d never felt more at home as when my husband, son, and I all lived together under her peaked roof.

You’ll be happy to know our former home went to terrific new owners, a young couple. He’s an electrician, and she’s a nurse, and they were so taken with the garden that they wrote us a love letter to accompany their offer.

But where did the man and I go? And does the new place have a garden?!?!

Let’s start there next time.

You might like this book of poetry themed on how nature, spirituality, and love can be healing balms.

Broom of Anger

Head-injury victims can relearn motor functions even when those areas of the brain are traumatized. You’re continually conditioning your brain with dopamine hits to curate your life for public consumption on Substack—in a particular way, for more likes or comments. To learn to play an instrument, you must practice, another way to train your brain.

So neuroplasticity is science. I hope that doesn’t put you off after the onslaught of attempts over the past five years to condition you into believing that you should just shut off your brain and trust the experts.

I’m not asking you to do that. Far from it.

What I am asking you to do to is join me in this journey.

In the two years that I’ve been retraining my brain and actively using other interventions to treat an autoimmune condition, I’ve had to take up a pitchfork and dig through what was at the root of my illness: trauma.

I’m not using the t-word lightly.

Here’s the truth.

My biological father repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped me when I was just a little girl—too young to understand, comprehend, and process what he did to me. Not just my mother’s but every adult’s denial, avoidance, and enabling, neglectful acts perpetuated and exacerbated his crimes, compounding them and creating an environment of chronic trauma.

There’s a lot of shame attached to the crimes—and that’s what they are, prosecutable crimes as recognized by our justice system.

But I’ve heard that shame isn’t something human beings naturally feel; rather, it’s put there by other people’s reactions to whatever the thing is you’re made to feel ashamed about.

It doesn’t make logical sense for me to feel ashamed of the crimes committed against me. They happened to me—I was the victim, and as a mere child, I was at the mercy of the very adults who were supposed to protect me: I was utterly defenseless.

So why the shame?

No one wants to hear about heinous crimes committed against innocents. It’s “too triggering.” We look away, avoid, disengage, maybe even dissociate.

And that’s the last thing victims need.

The looking away, the avoidance—it’s what casts us all in shame.

As if the victim is the embodiment of the crime itself.

Almost as if she’s to blame for it.

It’s a terrible cliché these days to say you’re “breaking your silence,” but that’s what I’m doing here.

I’m breaking my silence so that I can breathe.

I’m breaking my silence to clear space for other victims to breathe, too. And in our shared breaths, we might feel less alone.

Less like victims and more like survivors. Maybe even thrivers. Is that a word? People who thrive in life.

🌳 How is trauma at the root?

In those moments when my father brutally attacked me, my psyche at ages five, six, seven, and so on could only cope.

Imagine the very person you would call for help is the one hurting you.

You know the phrase “coping strategy.” My brain, my glorious, brilliant brain, when faced with the horrendous, the incomprehensible—when staring into the face of evil itself—my brain came up with a whole suitcase full of coping strategies.

One of these was to make sure I was kept constantly alert for the next attack.

It could come at any moment.

Nowhere was safe: not my own bed, or home, or our family car.

No one could be trusted: not my own mother or grandparents, aunts, or uncles, or our neighbors, and not even the doctors at the military base where my father worked.

I learned to be hypervigilant.

My immune system learned to treat anything entering my body as a foreign invader.

This tracks, doesn’t it? If your own father can attack you, then anything can, and over a lifetime, that anything grows to include the food you might otherwise take sustenance and pleasure in eating, the flowers you admire in look and scent, the very air you breathe.

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🧑‍🌾 Where we’ve been so far

I launched this Substack in late summer 2022 as an outlet for my experiences with city homesteading, which was itself borne out of a quest for the perfect autoimmune diet.

Through that work, I developed boss homesteading skills that are still with me and still valid. I tested and perfected them and shared them with you, my readers. I am now convinced that diet alone is not the answer for autoimmune conditions like mine and in fact, the wrong, restrictive diet can be part of the problem. But I continue to recommend the eating habits my guest authors and I have tackled at Brunette Gardens:

🚬 Eliminating nicotine and recreational drugs entirely and minimizing pharmaceuticals when possible

🧪 Avoiding processed food and food additives, thickeners, gums, and other lab-generated ingredients

🧁 Avoiding refined white sugar, along with alcohol and seed oils

🌾 Eating whole grains, legumes, and nuts and preparing them in time-honored ways to make them more digestible and nourishing

🐔 Gaining the vital nutrients that can only come from trusted, regenerative animal sources, whether meat, egg, or dairy, and including raw food and organs

🥗 Eating vegetables you gather from as close to the source as possible, whether your own garden or a local farmer’s, most often cooked or prepared using ancient fermentation techniques

My recommendations align with the new guidelines released today by the US Department of Health and Human Services. I’ve personally been hoping for this shift and applaud the Trump Administration for making it (though the cap on saturated fat still needs to be raised).

Think about this: If the food fed to an abused child is itself unhealthy or read by the body as a foreign invader because it contains chemicals and additives, the brain is in a way exhibiting cleverness in triggering a whole host of what we call sensitivity or autoimmune responses to it.

I realize this might be a bit confusing, the connection between autoimmune conditions and food sensitivities, trauma, neuroplasticity, child abuse, and diet and nutrition, with the homestead garden as a balm and salve overall. Let’s tug on the threads and unravel the mess together.

🔭 What’s ahead

Out of the 230-plus posts published here, the ones that seem to resonate best with readers are the stories that I felt the most nervous about, like this essay on trying to fill your empty nest with baby chicks or this one questioning the ability to homestead in late middle age.

During my break from this Substack over the past six months, I kept thinking about what’s vital to me. When the idea of sharing my writing makes me anxious, it’s because the topic is crucial. I feel it in my flesh and bones.

I pledge to write in that space. When my post shows up in your feed, you’ll know it’s worth reading because as a writer I’ve already shown up for you.

Are you with me?

The full title is Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them1, but a more accurate subtitle might have been ‘and the stories that make them,’ for it’s the strength of the storytelling that really sings in this work of non-fiction.

Now, I was already highly predisposed toward loving this book, since I’m somewhat obsessed with bees. I volunteered with Shutterbee, a citizen-science bee study, for all four years the program ran. I’ve also been a past supporter of Wild Ones, a group that promotes native-plant gardening for the express purpose of providing habitat for pollinators, especially native bees.

But my personal obsession aside, I challenge any of you to try reading this book and not fall in love with native bees.

Whether it’s the eponymous sunflower chimney bee—which builds little turret-like ‘chimney’ structures at the opening of its ground nest—or the habit of some bees to grab hold of a flower or stem with its mandibles and sleep hanging upside-down—the bees are a storied lot. While the numerous full-color, close-up photographs of bees tell their tale in visuals, it’s Embry’s enjoyable prose, tinged with a flare for the dramatic, that keeps one riveted:

The battle of the budworm began in 1952 at Budworm City in the upper reaches of New Brunswick, Canada. Given that the entire place consisted of sixteen shacks and an air strip buried in the woods, Budworm Village would have been a more appropriate name. Nevertheless, from that air strip, pilots flew World War II surplus biplanes loaded down with the chemicals needed for the aerial assault on the enemy, Choristoneura fumiferana, a small gray-and-brown moth. The innocuous-looking adult wasn’t the true problem; it was the ravenous young larva, a caterpillar called the eastern spruce budworm, that they sought to kill.

Despite this passage’s heft toward a discussion on pesticide use and its resulting damage to bees, the book is neither screed nor doom-and-gloom depressant. Embry encounters each new problem facing native bees with a healthy dose of skepticism to all things commercial and chemical, but she doesn’t allow that bias to cloud her judgment or reduce her optimism. By the end of the book, Embry has given us knowledge, and that knowledge is power. I learned, for example:

• That native bees alone pollinate tomatoes. The tomato flower requires a technique called “buzz pollination,” and only North American native bees do that; the European honeybee cannot.

• While our native bees are in decline, even when their numbers are down, we can find hope in their resiliency: Some bees when under distress from dwindling forage resources will diversify, finding new plants to visit for pollen and nectar.

• Converting your own lawn to native plants can have a positive effect on native bee populations, extending their forage opportunities.

Embry leaves us with a report of an initiative to remake golf courses—Operation Pollinator—into areas where bees might find a home, in such an unlikely place. That should give your average home gardener plenty of inspiration. As Embry puts it:

If golfers and golf course superintendents can rethink normal for golf courses, then surely the rest of us can reimagine our lawns as a place for grass and flowers. After all, that’s the way it used to be.

I give this book an A+ for its entertaining accessibility, its heart and science in equal measure, and its balanced perspective. To learn more, check out Paige Embry’s website.

Here are a few more recommendations for summer reading… my own Dreamslippers stories about a family of detectives who solve crime using their ability to slip into other people’s dreams…

Book 1: Cat in the Flock

Book 2: Framed and Burning

Book 3: Bound to the Truth

Boxed Set: All 3 Books + Novella

However, when I went back last summer to purchase another one, the price had jumped a whopping 30 percent due to inflation. Wah-wah….

Fortunately, I didn’t have to lay out a bunch of extra cash just to get my wildlife fix. Bird baths can be expensive, and they’re often made too deep anyway to be comfortable for most birds, hence the need to add a sizable rock to the one in the video. But you don’t need to buy something new. All you need are some DIY super powers:

You can make a perfectly good bird bath with castoff items you might have lying around in your basement or garage.

Here’s how.

I made my first bird bath using a plant stand and the lid to a frying pan we no longer used.

I got the idea to repurpose the frying pans from a recommendation from the St. Louis Audubon Society to use trash-can lids, suggested because they are the right shallow depth for a bird bath.

But I didn’t like the idea of trash-can lids in my garden; they’re usually plastic and unsightly, and I didn’t have any on hand and didn’t want to buy them just for this purpose. But thinking about lids put me onto the frying pans I had in a giveaway box in the basement.

My observances back up Audubon’s recommendation. Birds much prefer shallow water, and pot lids are perfect! I also fit one into a breeze block, with a larger rock set next to it for additional perch surface.

The rocks give butterflies and moths some purchase. They have the added benefit of acting as a heat sink so the water takes longer to freeze when the weather turns cold (more on this in a minute).

For deeper pan bottoms, here’s a solution so that birds of all sizes can access the water: Place a large paver into the pot for a sturdy perch.

Contrary to misperception, you do not need to fork out a lot of dough for an electrical bubbling-water system. While I’m sure as some folks argue, birds are attracted to the sound of trickling water, all manner of birds regularly use our DIY water “features” like we’re an oasis in the middle of the desert. There’s just no need to lay out a lot of cash for some fancy system that isn’t sustainable anyway in terms of electricity and water use.

If you really must have water movement in your feature, you can get an inexpensive solar fountain, like this one.

The problem I had with it is that the suction cups aren’t very good at keeping it stationary, so it floats to the top, making it an unsuitable perch for small birds. You can see I tried to weight it down with rocks, but that didn’t last. This bath was only used by the occasional large bird—robins or crows.

Now, about winter watering

Most people think of feeding and watering birds when they probably need it least, during the height of the growing season, when there’s more for birds to eat and drink otherwise. However, our feeders and bird baths are active all winter.

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I broke the news in the three-part series on our garden: We’ve left our beloved city farmhouse behind.

It’s been a very emotional parting.

My husband and I had lived in this place longer than any other, for him since childhood, and for me since… all time.

Yeah, in my half-century plus on Earth, this old Victorian lady housed me longer than any dwelling ever has—and she did so very well…

…The signature creak of her old floorboards—original to the house. The sunlight streaming in through a back window with its view of the “secret” garden, a hanging prism shooting rainbows around the room. The heaviness of the pocket door between the living and dining rooms, and the smooth, oiled slide of her turn-of-the-last-century hardware.

Architecture, just like art and literature, is important. The carved shield on the fireplace mantle, the transom windows above the doors, a copper doorknob… How I wanted to take that one with me, just that, a doorknob that no one would miss, a token. But I left it because it’s part of this grand ol’ gal, and I didn’t want to piece her out. I know what it’s like when people take pieces of you, and I wanted to leave her whole.

Architecture connects us with a past in which craftsmanship and attention to detail were still guiding construction principles. See this outline following the base of the stairs; slide your hand down the bannister and admire the newel post. Imagine antique varnish, faded by the hands of all the women who’ve polished it before you.

When we bought the house in 2017, the mantle, the staircase, and all of the beautiful old door and window frames on the first floor had been hastily painted a bland brown, streaked right over the old, crackling varnish. We spent years freshening her up with coats of white.

The dining room is a special place, and from the start, I imagined extended family gatherings there around an oversized table. We bought one within months and made good on that, my family across the two states bisected by the Mississippi River driving in from either side to our half-way point for holidays and other occasions. I chose to drench the room in this breathtaking deep blue to bring out its features even more as a background for all days but especially the holidays.

Sadly, the pandemic interrupted all of that, and what one trauma will do is envelop any past traumas left unattended and unearth them, like a coffin in a flood zone.

I wish I could say that big farmhouse table brought my extended family together for all and for good, and it did for a time. But deep trauma needs more attention than my birth family gave ours, and it was always more than the table and that dining room could handle. It won’t be papered over easily, as I understandably tried to do (hope springs eternal) with my series on returning home again.

But that’s a tragic story for another day, not now. Today, for you, my reader, this is a tribute, a triumphant one, to a gorgeous abode that sheltered its owners well for eight wonderful years.

She was built in 1904, the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, during the city’s glory days. Nothing echoes that era better for me than the front-porch ball finials, preserved though the rest of the porch had been replaced. To highlight the finials, I painted them in the Victorian gumdrop style.

I carried this over to the front and back doors as well.

The colors might not be your cup of tea, and that’s fine. They fit the art I brought with me and my persona as a writer in the game industry running her business out of the house.

The finials also fit in perfectly with the neighborhood, called Mapleweird, a play on the name Maplewood. In fact it’s not just a neighborhood like those in other cities but its own incorporated town, though geographically it’s contiguous with the city of St. Louis. Here the city and the county run under entirely separate governments. For my friends in Seattle or those familiar, this would be like if Ballard had never been annexed (many there still wish for independence, ha ha), and Seattle was not part of King County.

On that note, I’ve always thought St. Louis vastly underrated for its cultural offerings—world-class museums, a zoo, and science center, all free—especially when seen in light of its affordability. Anthony and I could never have bought a place in that beloved old Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, but there we were with a lovely old farmhouse and quarter-acre plot in Mapleweird, more working class and walkable than Ballard and just as quirky and fun, with its Route 66 vibe and early 1900s storefronts still intact.

Over these eight years, I got to dig into this place, and not just its soil. For the first time, I lived in one home long enough for my houseplants to need bigger pots, for the furniture to need several rearrangings as our lives changed—making space for two home offices, emptynesting and then having our son move back in before joining the Navy, and then emptynesting again. We even cleaned out the basement twice after the pandemic shortages and our permaculture ways bent us slightly toward hoarding.

We invested in this building as well, with a full-basement sump pump, large-capacity gutters with leaf guards, a new back porch, new dishwasher (Bosch, baby), fancy farmesque kitchen faucet, snazzy rain barrels, and a fully fenced yard in long-wearing cedar planks, among other expenditures. Besides the hard work and patience in the garden, we put hard-earned funds into this place to keep her fit for the future. In our multi-year search for a new place, we’ve found that too few people do the same these days.

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She’s a hard friend to say goodbye to, this home. I’m not ashamed to say I hugged that stairwell newel post and blew her kisses as I closed the back door for the last time.

Though she’s 121 now, she told me she felt prettier than she ever has, and thanked me for all the attention and care.

Though I’m in my fifties now, I told her I’d never felt more at home as when my husband, son, and I all lived together under her peaked roof.

You can pick up several of my books at 25% off right now in the Smashwords summer/winter sale.