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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Read more

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.

In a comment on part 1 in this series, one of you readers mentioned being a fan of before-and-after garden makeovers, so I thought it would be fun to show you the difference between when we began our major project back in 2017 and how it looks now, as we turn it over to new owners.

One of the most striking differences is the “secret garden” vibe we created versus the exposure we experienced in the beginning, as such a rare, large plot in a city neighborhood. Many people say it’s the biggest yard in this whole area of St. Louis, so it was worth the trouble to create a tree grove, which will offer even more privacy to the new caretakers as these junipers plus a Shumard oak and black-gum tree continue to mature.

Here’s another comparison, from the back of the property.

Speaking of screening the apartment building and lot next door, check out the dramatic difference between then and now.

Whereas in the beginning, the yard was dysfunctional and very exposed, now it’s filled with secluded nooks.

Remember that little hydrangea, one of the first of more than 100 native species we planted? She’s a beast now.

Here’s a triptych to demonstrate the progression from 2017 to 2020 to 2025.

A touchstone over the past eight years has been for me to stand on the back porch and gaze down the middle sidewalk path, a relic from who knows how long ago in this 121-year-old garden’s history. Here’s another triptych to show the beginning, middle, and end, or at least the end for us, but the beginning for the new owners!

It’s been heart wrenching to leave a garden I’ve toiled over, loved, and lived in for longer than any other place in my fifty-plus, very nomadic years. I spent some time saying goodbye to the flowers, shrubs, and trees I’ve tended, stroking the fuzzy little leaves of the lamb’s ear and drinking in all the colorful blooms. I offered some parting words to the now eighth generation of rabbits who’ve lived with us in mutual tolerance and quiet curiosity. I can say goodbye, so long, farewell, but the truth is, this garden will always remain in my heart.

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What do we in the gardening community mean by “invasive” plants? Why would we label some plants “thugs,” as if they’re getting all tatted up (not that tattoos are naturally a sign of thug life, despite the popular tattoo to that effect) and hiding unregistered firearms under their mattresses?

There is literally a whole class of plants that don’t play by the rules at all. They don’t take turns, they don’t share space, and they hoard all the food, light, air, and water for themselves. On top of that, they spread through any means necessary, proliferating more like a virus or a parasite than a plant.

Yes, even the pretty ones.

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Perhaps you were drawn in by the delicate, orchid-like petals of the flower in the photo at the top of this post: Japanese honeysuckle, AKA Lonicera japonica. It’s quite lovely, this plant. In its native environment, I’m sure it makes for a wonderful garden vine. Its dark green, ovate leaves foreground the vanilla cream-to-pale yellow flowers that appear in May. The scent they give off is intoxicating, a heady, thick sweetness you can practically taste. In fact, you can taste it; pull the pistil out and touch its end to your tongue, and it’s like a dab of sugar. In fall, the flowers give way to bright red berries.

But here in the Midwest, its beauty is a betrayal. It takes up valuable real estate, covering whole forests in dense vine, while offering very little to native butterflies and other pollinators in return. It didn’t evolve with the native ecosystem; it has few predators.

In our back forty, or, um, quarter acre, it spanned about two thirds of the property line. That’s a lot of vine, and it all had to go.

As a couple of aging Gen Xers, we realized we needed to hire help in removing it. We didn’t have the heavy-duty tools of professional landscapers, and while we could have rented them, we believe there’s a time and place to let an expert in to do the job better than you can. This was definitely one of those times, and one of the most obvious places.

The landscapers removed the vine entirely, along with a lot of other sad face-making plant situations, such as a diseased, dysfunctional willow tree that had been poorly placed—directly under a power line—and then aggressively cut back every year, a tragic testament to the importance of choosing the right site for your tree.

We treated the honeysuckle roots/stumps ourselves with glyphosate once removed, as recommended by everyone and their cousin in the plant business. My personal feeling back in 2018 was that there are already more than enough chemicals in the world, but since we couldn’t very well conduct a controlled burn here in the city, where they won’t even let us build a fence over six feet tall, we had to settle for chemical means.

Eight years later, I would go a different route. While I haven’t used glyphosate since then, I regret using it at all and support its outright ban.

I don’t want to get too thick into the weeds on this debate, as I realize folks hold strong opinions on all sides, but the embrace of extremely unnatural means in order to control nature—even for nature’s own good—seems ill advised at best and at worst, quite naturally doomed to fail.

Our garden today is heavily dominated by native plants, and though I still find stray honeysuckle vines creeping in here and there, it’s a solid ecosystem. It’s also a prime example of what it is: a platinum-certified Bring Conservation Home program garden. We’ve given two public tours to help encourage other gardeners in this direction.

That said, I’ve always appreciated some of the non-natives that came with the place, such as our delightful daffodils, a true harbinger of spring here in the River City. A curious thing happened during our second spring here. All manner of daffodils sprouted up and rung their little bells to signal the change of season. It was curious because the year before, we hadn’t received this kind of show.

The latency might have been because the year we bought our house, the developer who flipped it had basically razed the grounds down to nothing but short grass and nubs. Since bulbs won’t flower again if you cut their leaves too early, the daffies might have gone into a bit of shock from defoliation and needed time to recover.

Living in the Midwest again after nearly two decades away and experiencing the full four seasons in all their extremes put me back into that mode of feeling a rare joy to see them as winter gives way to spring. To have them suddenly come up like crazy on my own property amped up the good feelings considerably.

This orange-tinged beaut grows in huge clusters near the front stoop and in the back where we tore out the old chainlink fence in 2018. I’d never seen one like it, but Jason Delaney of phsdaffodils informed me it’s a double daffodil called Narcissus ‘Tahiti.’ Hybridized by the great Irish daffodil breeder J. Lionel Richardson, ‘Tahiti’ was introduced in 1956 and is “one of the most-awarded double daffodils in the garden and exhibition sectors,” according to Delaney. I’ve made space for this prestigious daffodil and allowed it to naturalize throughout the garden.

Daffodils aren’t the only non-native I’ve allowed to flourish.

Lilacs naturally stir a romantic, traditional feeling in the heart, I think, without feeling overly fussy or too precious the way some classic ornamentals can. Our venerable old lilac has no trouble attracting pollinators during its dramatic show of springtime blooms. Before our native trees and shrubs found their footing, the lilac was the garden’s spring focal point, with a heady scent of lilac wafting into the house when the windows are open, as they are every fall and spring.

I once had a white lilac, back in Tacoma, Washington, where they are often covered in pale blue lichen. But this lilac-colored lilac really takes the cake. Speaking of cake, you can decorate cakes with the flowers, as some people do. The blossoms are edible for both humans and animals. As you might know if you’ve been with me a while, I use them in everything from drawer sachets to syrup each spring.

So early on I appreciated the flora that didn’t quite fill the native-plant focus here.

But it’s that focus that frames the landscape in 2025.

Two were already here. Besides the jaunty little violet ground cover I mentioned in part one of this series, a native fern had taken firm hold.

We noticed early on that a large number of ferns were thriving in two shady areas, and the generous volunteers for the Audubon Society who gave us recommendations for our native-plant enterprise ID’d one of them as native sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis). Unfortunately, the bulk of them were interwoven with honeysuckle vine and winter creeper, two thugs we needed to eradicate, so we had to cover over the ferns with our mix of cardboard and mulch meant to make anything underneath die off. This biodegradable mulch method worked great, and to our great joy, the sensitive fern, and not the two invasives, came bursting right up through the mulch. So we saved the native fern and destroyed the nasties. It’s thriving still, eight years later, providing a ground cover in a shady corner filled with pawpaw trees and a native hydrangea.

One of those Audubon Society volunteers was Gail Saxton, who passed away this spring. I did not know her well, but after our site visit, she returned to certify our garden three years later, thrilling to our speedy platinum award. I frequently ran into her at gardening events around town. She was a knowledgable plant woman, and her recommendations gave birth to a garden that has given me great joy to design and admire all these eight years, for which I am deeply grateful.

Inspired by Gail and other gardeners like her, my husband and I toiled over the years to transform this city plot, adding more than 100 native trees, bushes, grasses, flowers, and herbs.

Two of my favorites are serviceberry and persimmon, both featured in my Missouri Conservationist piece on native fruit trees. The two trees satisfy both our garden criteria in being simultaneously native and edible. The serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea) produces white blooms in spring, followed by red berries that look a lot like blueberries when they ripen in the fall. The birds eat them, and so do we, adding them to everything from smoothies to crumble. The persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) provides year-round interest, with its characteristic broken-block bark, greenish-yellow blooms, and deep orange fruit, also edible for both humans and animals. If you haven’t eaten a ripe persimmon fresh off the tree, I highly recommend it.

Channeling our inner Monty Pythons, we judiciously planted three shrubberies, all natives: 1) New Jersey tea, 2) hazelnut, and 3) wild hydrangea. The New Jersey tea leaves I was hoping to use as a non-caffeinated coffee substitute, but our eastern cottontail rabbits took a liking to them, a strong affection the New Jersey tea did not survive. The hazelnut is exactly what it sounds like, though the nuts are small and pilfered by squirrels before I can gather them in any quantity. The hydrangea has some known medicinal properties, though with so much else in the garden, I haven’t actually explored this value.

The aforementioned pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is native to Missouri and produces a delicious fruit most people liken to banana custard. Anthony sometimes lapses into a Walla Walla-by-way-of-Oklahoma mode of speaking he inherited from his father, whose people were Okies who up and decided at one point to head even further west. One of Anthony’s country sayings involves a pawpaw and a prickly pear (which, incidentally, is another native, edible plant):

When you pick a pawpaw or prickly pear,

And you prick a raw paw, next time beware.

Don’t pick the prickly pear by the paw;

When you pick a pear, try to use the claw.

Of course, the Internet tells me this is from the Jungle Book, which makes sense, since my husband knows all the words to “I Wanna Be Like You,” and now you can see why I adore this big Baloo.

Pawpaw flowers are “perfect,” which means they contain both male and female parts. The trick with pollinating them is actually that they need another species of pawpaw nearby, and the pollination is typically done by flies. What this means is that people sometimes hang raw meat among the branches of the pawpaw to attract the flies. That or you can hand-pollinate with a special brush. Hmm... we’ve decided to let nature handle pollination itself.

Another of my favorites is our Ozark witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis), though of the three we originally planted, only one remains. It gives us our first blooms of each new year—bright orange, ribbony crinkles appearing on bare twig as early as January.

Unfortunately one did not make it through a brutal drought, and another succumbed to the chickens, who found it quite tasty. The survivor is valiant.

Speaking of chickens, we earned an official farm designation in 2023, making us eligible for grants, not that we’ve applied for any. But when my game studio was gutted in the tech crash that year, we briefly flirted with the idea of other types of businesses we might launch, such as a native-plant nursery or urban-farm supplier to local restaurants and the farmer’s market. We eventually shied away from these ventures, but the farm designation remains.

Along with all those native plants, we put in two apple trees, one of which is just now beginning to yield fruit, as well as blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberries, the latter of which has been the most productive. The three pear trees all died of blight.

Herbs have also been key to our kitchen garden here, whether natives like hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), one of my favorite herbs, or standards such as sage and thyme.

Since 2020 we’ve put in a thriving, productive vegetable patch each year. I’ve kept copious records of our successes and failures, and you’re welcome to check out that spreadsheet if so inclined.

In these past five years, and in no small way a result of all that has been made clear because of the pandemic, we’ve slowly shifted away from our sole focus on native plants. In a concerted attempt to become healthier and more resilient and independent, we’ve grown everything from asparagus to zucchini. We’ve also raised chickens, a big deal and of which I’ve written plenty.

This seems like as good a time as any to announce we’re saying goodbye to our garden. We’ll soon be moving from this city and its sprawling suburbs of nearly three-million people and opting instead for a quieter life in a small town.

There we will have a new plot of land to love. Like this one was eight years ago, it’s a blank canvas waiting for us to convert it into something more useful for both us and wildlife, though the percentage of native plants we add will by necessity be lower than it has been here. Unlike when we acquired this garden, mature trees already grow in the new one, and at least two are natives: a couple of bald cypresses (Taxodium distichum) that anchor the backyard on both sides. I look forward to stretching out underneath them and dreaming up a new garden design.

More on the new project to come in time, but for now I’m still bidding a tearful farewell to the garden we created over the past eight years. Here’s a recent panoramic photo to bookend the one from 2019 I shared in part 1 (tap or click to enlarge).

Thanks for your interest in our little city homestead and for reading my words about it. I’m especially grateful to those of you who’ve followed along through the many years I’ve been writing about the things I like to grow.

Thanks for sticking with us all this time… especially those of you who’ve been following me even longer than these eight years of city gardening, if you originally found me via the Dreamslippers series books. Yeah, about a third of you harken all the way back to when Anthony and I lived in a small town in Washington state called Chehalis, and Seattle before that. Shout-out to all our friends in the Pacific Northwest!

With blood, sweat, and tears over these eight years, we finally achieved our vision: a productive, wildlife- and pollinator-friendly garden bursting with native plants, beneficial non-natives, and edibles.

When we bought the property in 2017, we got a great deal, likely in part because the backyard was what you might call a problem situation.

To the left you can see the zigzagging chainlink fence and the way the whole property butts up against the neighboring apartment building parking lot. Bonus: A view of the dumpsters! The yard was a relic of mid-century landscaping values, with big, fat circles of day lilies, hostas, and euphorbias, at that point overgrown with weeds and spilling into the grassy areas, which were also mostly weeds (not that we don’t appreciate weeds). I think a lot of potential buyers took one look at this yard and saw themselves having to do a lot of awkward mowing, not to mention constantly hacking away at nuisance foliage.

That first year, we didn’t do anything radical to the yard, or the house, for that matter, as we were still getting to know the place. It’s a good idea to sit with a big project like this, if you’re living in the place yourself, to come to understand it fully before diving in with major fixes. It was a chore, but we mowed the lawn and beat back the invasive overgrowth as best we could.

Our first step in the fall of 2018 was to invite experts from the St. Louis Audubon Society's Bring Conservation Home program to conduct a site visit. Based on their recommendations, we chose to remove our serious problem plants first, which at that time comprised the majority of the greenery. The chainlink fence was overgrown with invasive plants on every single side. The three culprits were: 1) winter creeper, 2) Japanese honeysuckle, and 3) sweet autumn clematis. These have been eradicated, though we continue to remove seedlings to this day.

Next we installed a six-foot cedar fence around the entire backyard, to provide privacy and security, as well as screen the view of the parking lot full of cars next door (and the dumpsters). The fence turns out to have had the added benefit of protecting our plantings from deer. You wouldn’t have thought there’d be a deer issue in the middle of a major metropolitan area with a population of three million people, but I’ve spotted them at a nearby pocket park. Not that we would mind deer, but without the fence, we would have had to devise another strategy to keep deer from the edibles and other plants.

For financial reasons, we split the fence job, completing the side between us and the apartment building during the summer and opting to finish in fall. I wasn’t sure they could dig the posts in as late as the week after Thanksgiving, but the fence contractor said it would be no problem.

In between, we had landscapers remove the honeysuckle, and what lay in wait underneath kind of horrified us.

You already saw the chainlink fence on the southeast side of the property, and it was eyesore enough, not to mention tough to remove since the winter creeper (which is supposed to be a ground cover) had woven itself up through the chainlink so that the fence and the creeper had essentially become one.

We assumed the fence on the rear and northwest sides would be the same. But we were wrong. It was worse.

Yeah, it looked like the edge of a demilitarized zone.

Although the honeysuckle vine was invasive, it had served as a rather attractive green screen. Taking it out left a large swath of bare, ugly fence topped with barbed wire.

But why? Who or what had they kept in? Or out?

We’ll never know. But that fence had to go.

We felt really exposed after the honeysuckle came down and before the fence crews began work, but once the fence started to take shape, the farmyard began to feel a lot cozier. And we got a ton of compliments from our neighbors on all sides.

After the fence, we put in the first set of trees and shrubs and began the long process of sheet-mulching the turf grass, as it was our intention to convert the entire grounds to mixed plantings, with little to no grass. We used a layer of cardboard with a generous helping of mulch on top. We scavenged most of the cardboard from our neighbors’ recycling bins and a local brewery’s box-discard dumpster and ordered the mulch in bulk for the cost savings.

See my how-to on sheet-mulching, which is really easy, especially if you’re talking about a small plot of land. But here’s a glimpse of what it entails for a project of this scale. To mulch a quarter acre, you need a lot.

We continued to sheet-mulch the lawn throughout the fall, winter, spring, and summer of 2018-19, so that by August of 2019, we had more than half the ground covered. Here’s a panoramic image showing the wraparound fence, newly installed trees and other plants, and the sheet mulch.

Laying cardboard and shoveling mulch on top of it, especially over this much area, was a lot of hard work. But that meant we no longer had to mow the backyard. Besides, without the grass to compete with, our native violet ground cover took over on its own, and we liked it better than grass.

That said, the violets were the first succession, which later gave way to asters. We enjoy asters, but they are tall and aggressive, at least in our garden. In retrospect, we could have gone more slowly, planting a wide range of natives in clumps and waiting to see how those established before covering over all of the lawn. Of course, we wouldn’t then have earned a platinum award in just three years from the Audubon Society, but it would’ve been fine to slowly progress through silver to gold and then platinum.

In 2020, we added a long list of native trees, shrubs, and flowers, using thrifty resources provided by programs like the Missouri Department of Conservation's seedlings program, Grow Native! sales, and the free offerings of our local Wild Ones chapter. These plants filled out the landscape, taking the place of the invasives and attracting wildlife and pollinators in droves.

Our first official edible from the garden? Wild cleavers, which I harvested in spring 2019 for tea, as cleavers are an awesome tonic for reducing swelling and water retention. Next came basil in the summer.

By that winter, we had all but one small back strip converted from turf. In the spring of 2020, we let it go wild while we focused on sowing food plants in those sheet-mulched areas, which by that point were ready for more tender plantings. We also put in a squash tunnel, a rain garden, two hugelkultur mounds, and a wooden pergola.

Originally, the pergola supported two varieties of our native passionflower (AKA maypop), which spoiled the bees the first summer and yielded edible fruit. However, it dies back each winter and doesn’t grow enough in one season to cover the pergola, so I later replaced it with the very beautiful native Campsis radicans, or trumpet vine.

Since the beginning, we’ve made great use of our spring ephemerals, turning them into everything from tea to infused vinegar.

Even before we made the decision to replace the zig-zagging chainlink fence, we knew we wanted to screen the neighboring apartments with a row of tall evergreens.

We had a bit of a dilemma, though, as the usual recommendations for an evergreen privacy screen just weren’t suitable. Arborvitae is often used—too often, as it turns out—and the plant is suffering opportunistic disease as a result. We considered for a moment the lovely ‘bracken’s brown’ magnolia, with its velvety undercoat of brown fuzz on the leaves and distinctive cream blossoms, and we nearly got talked into it by folks at our local garden center. However, I was really committed to the native-plant mission, and neither magnolia nor arborvitae is native to Missouri.

A good native evergreen is eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), but unfortunately, it grows too tall and wide to work as a screen in our narrow strip. However, the Audubon Society came up with a great solution: Juniperus virginiana ‘Taylor.’ That’s the tree you see going in here.

The Missouri Botanical Garden designated ‘Taylor’ as a “Plant of Merit,” and its history I’ll quote directly from their plant-finder listing:

‘Taylor’ is an upright narrow columnar eastern red cedar that typically grows to 15-20' tall but to only 3-4' feet wide. Silvery blue-green foliage is attractive throughout the growing season. Foliage may take on some bronze tones in winter. ‘Taylor’ was reportedly discovered in Taylor, Nebraska, as a chance seedling and was released in 1992 to the nursery trade by the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum.

I love that this “chance seedling” from the native eastern red cedar is the perfect narrowness and height to soften the fence line and help screen the view from the neighbors’ balconies without overwhelming the yard.

I’ve always enjoyed the look and scent of juniper berries. What really sold my husband on the Taylors is the fact that juniper berries are not only good for the birds, but they’re useful to humans as well. We’ve seen fronds laden with berries used to smoke salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and the berries have numerous culinary uses—from the obvious gin flavoring to the more obscure addition to fruitcake. I’ve used them in ferments.

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We wanted to accomplish two things with our garden:

1. rescue our quarter-acre from exotic invasives and resource-intensive grass lawn and reframe it as an oasis for native pollinators and

2. blend that mission with our need to become much more self-sufficient with homegrown food and other products.

We managed to squeeze in a couple of true eastern red cedars as well, finds from a native-plant sale.

Note we planted all of these red cedars in the fall. A lot of people don’t know you can plant that time of year, but it’s actually better to put in trees and shrubs in autumn because they put their emphasis on building strong root structures to support the upward leaf growth in spring.

On the other side of the fence-line path went a beautiful Shumard oak and a black-gum tree. Nearer to the house, we added several persimmons and two serviceberries.

The persimmon is a special kind of fruit, as I covered in a recent article. I’m not talking about the Asian ones you get at the grocery store, but these yummy Midwestern natives. We’ve enjoyed them in many recipes since they began fruiting a few years ago.

We ask a lot of trees, and they give it.

Twenty nineteen in particular drenched us here in the Midwest. That plus having mulched over a great deal of our backyard with wood chips—creating a conducive environment for fungi—kicked off the first of our mushroom mania, putting my husband and me on a quest to learn more about them.

To that end, I reached out to two mushroom mavens—Ellen King Rice, wildlife biologist and writer, and Maxine Stone, author of the guidebook Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms—for help learning how to find and eat wild fungi. They taught me how to safely forage for wild mushrooms, a skill I’ve developed and honed on my own since then. It’s a practice no one should take casually, at least if you’re looking to eat them.

For my mushroom mavens, first I compiled images from backyard foraging as well as from walks in the woods. Then I checked in with them for some IDs, adopting their recommendations and learning from their advice along the way.

One of Ellen’s tips right off the bat was to get a good field guide, and Maxine’s book Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms1 fit the bill. It includes 24 recipes for using common edible mushrooms found in Missouri—delicious-sounding dishes like candy-cap sauce and barley-and-blewit salad. That book and many others are published by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC), the same agency that puts out the award-winning magazine Missouri Conservationist, where my article on gardening with native fruit trees appeared last month.

With this project, I had asked Ellen to stretch outside the Pacific Northwest territory she knows best as I explored the mycology of the Missouri river bluffs where I frequently hike and the quarter acre that is our little city farmstead. So Ellen offered to focus on providing general biology insight and ID tips instead of specific IDs. When Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms didn’t yield a perfect ID, Maxine herself filled in any gaps.

Here are our conversations set as a Q&A. At the end, I’ve also compiled a list of easy steps to take when foraging for fungi on your own.

Lisa Brunette: Let’s start with the photo at the top of this post. I believe that marshmallow fluff-meets-wart stuff on top, paired with the bright orange cap, signal the poisonous amanita. Am I right?

Ellen King Rice: Some mushrooms begin growing inside an egg-shaped “leathery” sack. As the mushroom pushes up, the sack breaks apart and becomes blotches or spots on the new mushroom’s cap. The “warty” cap and the “egg cup” base are indeed hallmarks of the amanita group of mushrooms. Some of the amanitas are terribly poisonous. Some are psychoactive. A few are edible. Which leads us to the number one rule of mushrooming:

Don’t eat fungi until you are an absolute first-class champion at identifying the genus and species you are hunting.

But mushrooms are not nuclear waste or some spy-novel deadly dynamite. You won’t be poisoned by a mushroom if you photograph it or handle it!

LB: Ah, so that’s where the “wart” comes from; fascinating! And thanks for the balanced approach to identification. I assumed all amanitas were poisonous, so it’s interesting to hear that some are actually edible. Still, the risk is pretty great, so I for one wouldn’t eat anything that looks like this. Better to admire its remarkable orange hue.

After more research, I can confirm this is an iconic amanita, most likely muscaria, although iNaturalist says it’s Amanita cesarea. Most of the photos I’m finding of cesareas don’t have the white flecks of fungus on top, though, so I’m going with Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric.

According to the MDC, amanitas account for 90 percent of mushroom-related deaths. In Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms, Maxine lists the Amanita bisporigera, or “destroying angel,” as the top poisonous mushroom to avoid in Missouri. “Ingesting one cap of a destroying angel can kill a man,” says the MDC.

Yeah, so fine to look at and even touch—according to Maxine, you can’t get poisoned unless you eat them—but I wouldn’t even think of tasting anything that looked remotely like either of these—amanitas are a no go.

Maxine says the “lookalike” mushrooms are where a lot of people can go wrong, too. She shows which ones to watch out for in particular. She also cautions against eating mushrooms you find in your yard or the wild first without consulting a mushroom expert. Where to find one of those? Here in Missouri, she suggests the Missouri Mycological Society. But lots of states have mushroom societies; here’s a full list.

Sticking with the color orange, as it’s one of my favorites, the next fungus is in keeping with that bold preference. What’s going on with this beauty?

EKR: This fungus as well as the next three lead us to the challenges of identification. Like Sherlock Holmes, we need to pay attention to a lot of details to know the entire story of “what’s going on.”

LB: I believe this specimen is a cinnabar polypore, Pycnoporus cinnabarinus, judging by the guidelines in Maxine’s book. It has no lookalikes—which aids in identification. Though beautiful, the cinnabar polypore is not considered edible.

If I had a sample, rather than just this image, I could make a spore print to lock in the ID, right?

EKR: The biggest “con” for field guides is that these books are often organized by spore-print color. You’re supposed to take a sample of the fungus home, lay a cap section on colored paper overnight, check the color of the dropped spores the next day, and then go to the correct section of the field guide to begin the identification process. Whew! Not always easy or possible, especially if there are pets or small children in the home. Pro: Sometimes one can page through the photos of the field guide and “bingo,” quickly land on a photo that looks just like our find (Keep looking! Sometimes many things are nearly identical!).

LB: Maxine walks readers through the process of obtaining a spore print in her book, and while you rightly point out how life doesn’t always provide the space for this step, it’s not that hard—basically setting the cap gills-down on a piece of paper and waiting anywhere from two to 24 hours for the spores to drop. Plus, as Maxine points out, “Your spore print may be a beautiful piece of art and even frameable.”

Next up is this incredible ‘tree condo’ my brother and I happened upon one day in the woods. By the way, check out all that velvety moss we’ve got here in Missouri. To me it rivals the Pacific Northwest—at least in early spring, when these were taken. By summer, it dries up pretty well, even when it’s wet. I think that might be due to the heat. But this is likely not enough for you to go on here.

EKR: I’ll give another tip for learning how to ID: Go on a mushroom-club outing. The pros are you’ll meet some nice people, and you may quickly learn half a dozen of the most common fungi in your area. The cons, however, are that the dogs need to stay at home, and not every outing may be kid-friendly. You’ll also be working with a group, so it may be slower or faster than you like.

LB: That’s a great idea and something I’ve personally never done. I’ve seen quite a few opportunities to go on birding walks with experts who can share tips, but I’ve never seen anything like that for fungus. I checked with Maxine, and she shared this:

The Missouri Mycological Society (MOMS) is very welcoming to everyone... especially kids!!! We love them. The web site is MOMYCO.org, and forays are listed under events... they are free and open to all. We also have an “experts” page. The folks listed will help with ID, and we also offer ID classes free to all members.

How could they not welcome kids with an acronym like MOMS?

So after consulting Maxine’s book and sharing the above image with her, we think very likely the fungus condo above is dryad’s saddle. Like the cinnabar polypore, this is another ‘pored bracket’ type of mushroom. These can grow both singly or in layered groups. This one looks very much like the dryad’s saddle, Polyporous squamosus, which is edible. But again, I’ll take a spore sample first before cooking this up if I encounter it again. Another good tip from Maxine is to keep a little bit of any mushroom you eat in case you need it for ID purposes in the event that someone reacts to it. Even if they’re safe to eat, some people are more sensitive than others.

Note all ‘fruiting bodies’ appearing aboveground are technically mushrooms; whereas, fungi grow mainly underground, so those really are mushrooms forming the condo.

The rest of the photos were all taken here in our own backyard. I should preface the first crop by letting you know we had a ton of bark mulch on our land, making use of the sheet-mulch method. So I think this curious flora was born of rotting wood chips. I’ve been calling them ‘spore pops.’ What are these strange, alien things, Ellen?

EKR: I feel completely confident about identifying these…

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I’ve talked with a lot of people over the years who spy my garden with envy but beg off on their own, claiming they’re “too much work.” But if we design it for enjoyment instead of drudgery, we might find we’re only too thrilled to cancel the gym membership in favor of a good weeding round in the veg patch.

It’s with that spirit that I offer you this roundup of links to some of our best Brunette Gardens posts over the past two-plus years. From helpful planting guides to hopeful stories, my aim is to inspire you to live your best gardening life.

My first offering is a comprehensive companion-planting guide, free for all who sign up for this newsletter. It’s the only guide I know of that lists traditional kitchen-garden plants next to North American natives.

Don’t fret if you’re lacking space to garden. As guest-author over at demonstrates, all you need is a kitchen countertop.

If, like me, you grew up in the 80’s and have had to forge an herbal legacy out of whole cloth yourself, this guest piece I wrote for ’s should resonate with you.

The below essay was reprinted by GreenPrints magazine, and readers tell me it makes them tear up, in a good way. The first three reads at GP are free, or you can just read it here.

One of our top five posts, this one on how to craft fermented sauerkraut the old-fashioned way can help you make best use of budget-friendly cabbage, whether you’re growing them yourself or buying them from your local farmer’s market.

Continuing the fermentation theme, check out this interview with of , on the occasion of the anniversary reprinting of her classic how-to.

If you’re scrambling to make use of all that spring kale before the Japanese beetles move in and claim them, allow me to introduce you to the ‘brake bleeder’ method of preserving food in jars, which extends their shelf life just a wee bit longer.

All the best with this year’s yarden. I wish you mulch success!

When traditional medicine—including elimination diets—failed to provide a cure, however, the treatment success I did find came through a slew of outside-the-mainstream interventions like yoga, acupuncture, therapeutic massage, and somatic dance. I also engaged in traditional psychotherapy, as the mind-body connection seemed to play a key role.

But those never brought me lasting relief from ailments, however much they helped emotionally and spiritually and in improving my overall physical condition itself.

Diet alone won’t work

Diet is usually thought to be the culprit for food and chemical sensitivities, so my practitioners and I hit that one hardest. After getting fully caught up in a quest for the perfect diet that would finally end my pain and symptoms, I hit a wall in late 2023. As I explain in this piece introducing the concept of brain retraining, that’s when I discovered the Gupta Program1.

One of the components of the Gupta Program is right in there with the other interventions, and that’s meditation, altered with some important tweaks, as I explained in this piece.

But even with the tweaks, meditation alone wouldn’t move the needle on my autoimmune condition. That’s because the condition is a physical one. Whether we call it MCAS or NIC, for neuroimmune condition, the pain and symptoms in the body are real.

I haven’t actually struggled much with the “it’s all in your head” assumption, though I know it’s a common source of frustration for many others with MCAS and similar conditions. My symptoms have always been measurable and observable, in the form of hives, rashes, bronchial wheezing, and other signs, including, for example, inflamed blood vessels and scar tissue in my bladder, visible during a cytoscopy—all of these signs acknowledged by my MDs.

It may be in your head, but it’s not mental

When I introduced the idea of a neuroimmune condition in that recent post, at least one commenter joked that these must be “all in your head” after all. But that’s definitely not what I meant by neuroimmune. The word ties two systems together, 1) the neurological, relating to the nervous system and 2) the immune system, which attacks perceived foreign invaders in an effort to keep the body safe.

These two systems trade signals via neurons in your brain, as a series of messages between the amygdala and insula. Here’s a video to illustrate.

A couple of notes on the video above:

• The precipitating event (the initial catalyst for the condition) might be a bonafide reaction to a substance in the environment—a household chemical or food additive. It might also be a virus or other illness.

• High levels of emotional distress and trauma can also be a factor, activating and then over-activating the stress response.

• This setup conditions the brain and body for overreactions to this and similar substances in the future.

The key takeaway

While a chemical substance might have initiated the first response, it is the immune system responding to substances in the environment that actually creates the symptoms. The condition thus becomes chronic, the reaction-response extending to a multitude of other triggers.

The symptoms themselves can then reinforce the immune-system response, sending a message that you’re in distress because you’re sneezing or wheezy or your stomach hurts. This can become a self-perpetuating cycle.

My self-love is chemical

Furthermore, our modern environments full of unprecedented levels of synthetic substances exacerbate the situation by causing inflammation in the body. Inflammation makes it more likely for triggers to kick off this signal loop in the brain.

That’s one of the reasons why the Gupta Program diet recommendation is to avoid processed foods. Since I’d cut them out already, I was ahead on diet and could focus on the other aspects of brain retraining in the program.

The main thing for the brain is to train

Which brings me to the exciting advantage of recognizing these types of autoimmune conditions as neuroimmune: We can retrain our brains away from this response.

As Ashok Gupta points out in the video above, our systems are a lot like a WWII soldier who’s been stranded on an isolated island and still thinks the war is raging thirty years after it ended. We just need to retrain the soldier to accept the fact that the war is over now, and he can stop fighting.

But just like that traumatized soldier needed care and a period in which to adjust, you can’t just tell your brain that certain foods, scents, or molds are not really dangerous.

First of all, our modern environments are loaded with them, causing inflammation and likely contributing to chronic illnesses and hormonal issues. They’re just not actually causing specific sensitivity reactions, which you can see because a) you don’t always react to them (many of us have good days and bad) and b) not every human being reacts to them.

Your brain cannot turn off the triggering response through logic or prayer or positivity or the power of suggestion. It takes repeated retraining exercises and techniques to accomplish this, sometimes unfolding over a long time. It can also require traditional psychotherapy, as I’ll get to in a moment.

I’ve been at this for 16 months, with a 75 percent recovery from all symptoms, which is 23 percent better than Gupta’s own clinical-trial results for MCAS.

My recovery is continuing, and I anticipate many more symptom-free days, with the techniques now part of my regular management of this condition.

Trauma at the root

There is often a tremendous connection between these neuroimmune conditions and trauma. The folks at the Gupta Program know this.

However, this program is neither meant nor equipped to treat trauma. The distinction I’ve encountered is that the program designers recognize the role trauma plays, and the coaches connected to the program are trauma-informed. But they are not trauma experts.

If you have experienced trauma in your life, especially during childhood—important because the brain is more malleable, like soft clay, during our formative years—I strongly recommend working with a trusted psychotherapist or other trained, experienced practitioner for additional support if you enroll in the Gupta Program or others like it.

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For me these two things had to go hand in hand. I’d done years of therapy soon after I first left my family home at 17. Therapy was a lifesaver for me, but it took brain retraining to finally get to the conditioned neurological response at the root of my illness.

Likewise, while brain retraining provided a missing link for me, I still had to return to therapy again—luckily for me, with the same therapist, who had yet to retire—in order to fully integrate the work from brain retraining. I’m still working on this last, crucial piece.

Think about it this way: What if that WWII soldier was right to remain vigilant? What if he’d been the victim of war crimes? In his case, the war crimes committed against him had never been acknowledged, the criminal never punished. He learned to mistrust the world for good reason, as his community, the military, his own squadron—everyone, in fact—had failed him.

Crime victims are too often asked to carry the burdens that should have been borne by society to redress wrongdoing and punish criminals. Victims are often left to be their own support for reparations and healing.

When society shirks its responsibility, the toll on the victim is profound.

My best to you

I hope by sharing my journey I can help others avoid the decades of pain, illness, and frustration I’ve endured.

Please know that I don’t receive anything from the Gupta Program for talking about it here. That program offers a money-back guarantee, no questions asked, if after a year you don’t see results. I’m skeptical by nature and signed up planning full well that if I didn’t get better, I’d take them up on the offer. I’m glad to say I didn’t have to do that. I renewed after one year and continue to see improvements.

On the therapy front, if you’ve never worked with someone, I have further caveats (life is full of these!). If at all possible, find a therapist who doesn’t put restrictions on what you can say, even if that’s to share how your guided nature meditation turned into an Uzi-fueled revenge fantasy. Nor should your therapist force you to forgive a perpetrator or even encourage you to do this, as forgiveness is absolutely not required in order to heal. These are both big topics and deserve more attention; in fact, I’m reading ’s book, You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms, right now and hope to share more in a future post.

How is this hitting you? I tried to distill a complex interaction down to its basic components; did this post make sense?

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Published by the Missouri Department of Conservation, this award-winning publication is so good, I’ve read every issue since then, cover to cover. The articles are top-notch, whether that’s an intimate look at wolf spiders, a transparent analysis of our state-wide feral hog problem, or the former agency director’s heartwarming monthly essays. A picture is worth a thousand words, of course, so the celebrated photographers whose work illustrates the stories in vivid detail certainly deserve their praise.

I felt I knew the magazine intimately, so when I had an idea for an article, I pitched it to the editor, and she accepted. As a published author for 30+ years and a former editor myself who’s been many times on the receiving end of such pitches, I can tell you there really is something to knowing the publication you’re targeting for a pitch.

The topic was also one I knew well: using native fruit trees in the home landscape. Around the same time I subscribed to Missouri Conservationist, I also began a deep dive into learning everything I could about the native flora and fauna of the Midwestern U.S. I had gardened with natives in the Seattle area for many years, and I also edited the gardening section as deputy editor of Crosscut (now part of Cascade PBS). But I needed to learn a very different ecology here in the Midwest.

I loved every minute of this crash course as I taught myself by designing our quarter-acre garden in the process. In just four years, my husband and I earned a platinum award from the St. Louis Audubon Society’s Bring Conservation Home program. That’s passion, for ya.

With our garden design, I had focused from the outset on including native plants that humans can eat or use as herbal medicine. It’s a big topic, so for the Missouri Conservationist piece, I pitched them a story specifically about native fruit trees. In “Garden of Eatin,’’’ I highlight persimmons, wild plums, and pawpaws, with a few other honorable mentions. You can read it online for free, but for you Missourians, check out the April 2025 print edition of this stellar publication, as there my story is accompanied by gorgeous photos from the Missouri Department of Conservation’s noted photographers (digital version here).

Especially for Brunette Gardens members, here are links to even deeper dives on native fruit trees, as a great place to keep exploring after you’ve finished reading Garden of Eatin.’

The first is an introduction to the versatile uses for persimmon pulp, including a cookie recipe.

Podcast version (audio):

Below are persimmon-planting details, plus a peek at a unique edible vine fruit. Note it says fall, but spring is also a good time to plant trees and vines.

Audio.

A recipe for a tasty chutney using native plums.

A fun foraging piece by my entertaining husband, featuring serviceberries.

One of the aspects of the MC piece I’m most proud of is how I worked in some cool, relevant background on Laura Ingalls Wilder, who lived most of her life in Missouri, as I detail in this piece on visiting her homestead.

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If the above links weren’t enough for you, you might also check out everything I’ve ever written for this Substack on the topic of gardening with natives.

I’ve also got you covered if you’d like to peruse a full list of all of my journalistic articles, interviews, and reporting, along with game- and book-publishing credits. I’m quite sure 😉 you’re all curious to know what I’ve done with my career when not a journalist. I came of age as a writer in a time period in which that has been a unique challenge, and the key to my survival has been to remain open and diverse in what I’m willing and able to write and edit (I’m especially looking at you, financial services reports…).

Thanks for bearing with me as I enjoy a rare moment when a garden writer’s labors—both in the garden and at the keyboard—bear fruit.