Preface, for a book I will someday write

I pulled into our driveway and put the car into park before noticing Joe walking towards us. Our daughter Charlotte was in the back, patiently waiting for her dad to open the car door and greet her, but of course refusing to let him get her out of the car, saving the actual physical labor of having a toddler to her 35 week pregnant mother.

Joe had a smile on his face, which was always a relief to see. These days it was so hard to keep ourselves afloat. It was almost always true that one of us was struggling. I felt content with where I was mentally at that moment, and given his smile, so did he, which would mean it had the potential to be a relatively calm night.

“Hi daddy!” our daughter yelled when he opened the door. I ran around to get her unbuckled and out of the car and she immediately took off to play on the homestead.

“Only had a small scare when doing the burns” Joe started. “The Woodline behind our property started to catch fire but I managed to get it out”. He looked nervous but chuckled.

Joe started doing strategic burns, hoping to help with the immense amount of ticks that we had on the property as well as fertility and growth. Burns were done all throughout history, especially during Native American time, and we were doing our best to get our land back to what it was supposed to be; thriving.

Joe and I met at an Educational non-profit dairy farm 8 years ago. I was working as part of the educational barn staff at that time and Joe was hired on as a farmer. His job was primarily working with the heifers and chickens, while mine included the animals that were used for show. I always said I worked for a glorified petting zoo while Joe got to really get his boots dirty. We formed a bond pretty quickly, after we got over the fact that he made me nervous and therefore I acted out of character time and time again. He was a book of knowledge and insight, and was constantly doing things out of the norm for the farm. While it may have been a non-profit, it wasn’t the most organized and staffed farm in the world, and I watched as Joe continually challenged the higher-ups to be better, usually losing those fights, but never losing his fire. He was a difficult man not to love, and to this day I watch people flock to him and ask for just a piece of his brain and time. There is something about him that exudes energy and light, and I was never the only person to see this. I fell in love with the fire and needed to be around it constantly.

Flash forward to 2022, where we decided to both leave that job and home, in hopes for something brighter for our future. At that time, Charlotte was just over one year old, and the only thing we knew was that we wanted to farm. Neither of us were born into farming so neither of us came from land and, given the post-covid life, land was the most expensive thing there was.

So we settled on 6.5 acres of raw, wooded land, and started a new journey of developing a homestead entirely by hand, and to say it has aged us would be an understatement.

We are still living out of our 2008 RV (named Terry) and flying under the radar with many local officials who would rather we live under a bridge than in a “non-taxable RV”. We are still slowly building our life here, making pathways, learning the land, and trying to be entirely comfortable with it. Not to mention I am 35 weeks pregnant writing this, so that has added an extra adventure that I think neither of us had originally prepared for.

Ultimately though, Joe and I have always jumped towards dreams. We never walked, we never stepped with caution, we just believed in our hearts and our passion and let it carry us to where we are today.

We never sit out. We always choose to dance.

This is our story of that dance.