I’m excited to tell you that Farming Grace is now with the typesetter. Meaning soon I will finally be able to put a book in your hands. It’s been a long five years. I began writing this memoir in July 2014. A number of you have been on this journey with me if you’ve been reading my blog since then.

In 2010, my literary agent told me I needed to start a blog. In those days I didn’t even know what a blog was and I wanted to write fiction. I had no idea what to write about in real life. What would I blog about? But around this time one of Scott’s students did me a favor. She got right in my face and said, “My mom hates you.” I had a baby in my arms and a toddler hanging on my leg. I was shocked that this high school girl confronted me this way. “Why does your mom hate me? I’ve never met your mom. I don’t even know your mom. I don’t know you.” The smile melted off my lips.

“My mom hates you because you’re so perfect,” the girl practically spit in my face.

“Oh, honey,” I said feeling truly grieved. “You don’t even know. You need to come live with me so you can see the truth. I’m so far from perfect it’s scary.”

After that day I knew what I would blog about. My down and dirty, raw and real, painfully ordinary life. But there was more to tell. Something extraordinary had happened to Scott and me just a few years before this high school girl slapped me down so hard. We had met Jesus and our new faith had changed our lives. We’d also become summer farmers. And on the farm, we were learning just how much we weren’t in control of.

I hope you like the opening of Farming Grace.

Here is where the story begins…

PROLOGUE

“The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.” ~Jack London

The doctor said I had a breakdown due to physical exhaustion. “You’ve had seven kids, four in the last eight years. Your body is drained, dangerously depleted of potassium. Your brain shut off to save your life.” This from a kind, smiling young physician.

“But it doesn’t feel physical. It feels spiritual and emotional,” I told the doctor.

“I’m sure it does, but your real problem is physical. You need rest and nourishing food. Let’s get you started on some vitamins. And can you hire help for around the house? Your large family must be a lot of work for you.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I laughed at the earnest young physician. Hired help wasn’t in my world, and I didn’t want to talk about things I couldn’t afford. I could hardly afford this medical care. Three days of not knowing who I was, being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, handcuffed because the sheriffs who came to our house thought I was having a psychotic episode due to drugs.

“Maybe someone slipped her something at that writing conference,” one of the fire department paramedics suggested to my husband.

“It was a Christian conference,” my husband assured him.

The paramedic raised his eyebrows as if my husband didn’t know poop from a pretzel. “Well, she’ll be tested for narcotics at the hospital. It sure looks like drugs to us.”

My husband told me the sheriff, who handcuffed me before they stuck me in the ambulance, was overweight. “He had a bald head and big round belly,” said my husband.

“Did I cuss him out too?” I asked. It wouldn’t have surprised me. I swore at everybody else. Out-of-my-mind cussing coming from a woman who hadn’t let a profane word slip past her lips since she gave her life to Christ twelve years earlier. A church lady who carried her Bible everywhere she went and came down hard on her teenagers for saying “holy cow” and “that sucks.”

“No, but you called the sheriff ‘Santa Claus.’ I think you really hurt his feelings.”

I wish I could have explained to that poor sheriff that every Christmas Eve the big red fire trucks drove down our dirt road with Santa on board. They came to distribute gifts to all the children in our rural neighborhood. It was a delightful tradition; our family always ran out to meet the trucks, our children dancing with expectation. These weren’t cheap, frilly gifts. One year our boys got scooters.

All the farmers and ranchers donated to the cause, so all the country kids got something really nice. I made cookies for the fire crew and handed them out as Santa passed out his parcels. I’m sure when I saw those fire trucks coming, I thought Santa was about to show up.

I wanted to say, “Sheriff Lloyd, it’s not your belly or your bald head. I’m just messed up right now and looking for Saint Nick ’cause I’m used to seeing Santa on big red trucks with ladders.”

En route to the emergency room, the paramedics freed my hands, replacing the cuffs with cloth restraints—not that I remember it. I vaguely remember hitting my dad in the yard before the police showed up. Slapping him as hard as I could across the face as he tried to calm me down. I was wearing my favorite jeans with holes in the knees. They were Italian jeans that felt like butter against my skin. I’d gotten them at a thrift store in Monterey where rich women dumped their clothes. I’d paid $48 bucks for them. They probably cost $480 brand new. You can buy a fat hog with that kind of money.

After hitting my dad, I grabbed the holes and ripped the jeans off my body. This was probably when my husband and my friend Kay decided it was time to call for help.

I told Kay at the hospital that a deeply buried anger at men drove me over the edge. And maybe in some painfully honest part of my mind, I was angry at God too, but I didn’t admit that to Kay or even myself. I was good at burying my feelings. I’d been digging that deep, dark hole for a long time. Stuff it all down. Don’t look at it. Don’t talk to it. Don’t touch it. Put on a sweet smile and plow through life like everything’s okay. But everything wasn’t okay. When I was coming apart, I told my husband I was a baby donkey. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a young donkey. Palm Sunday had just passed. The pastor preached about this donkey colt at church a few days earlier. Jesus didn’t ride a war horse into town like a conquering king. He came as a humble servant riding a beast of burden said the pastor. My husband has a literal translation of the Bible. Donkeys are called asses in this translation. Maybe this donkey story got stuck in my head. Or maybe I felt like a beast of burden myself. Women bear such a heavy load these days. Life becomes overwhelming. And extreme. Like a sport that can kill you. Like climbing Mount Everest.

“You gotta be tough,” my dad always said. So, I was tough until the day I wasn’t anymore. Until my ass went wild and broke free from its yoke in our front yard. When you’re tearing off your Italian jeans, out of your mind crazy, people take notice.  

But before going crazy, before the handcuffs, the ambulance, and the hospital, I had read a story of a starving little fox that found her way to a good man’s farm. Hungry, but scared to death, she refused to take the egg the good man left for her each day. After watching the man for some time, the little fox finally began to taste the egg he offered. At first, she would only take the egg out in the field after the man walked away, but day by day, the man drew her closer and closer to his house until, in great trust, she finally accepted the egg from his hand.

I grew up on a farm and knew about foxes: they’re egg thieves. Chicken eaters. Life stealers. Much like the way I lived as a young adult, prowling the edges of grace, thieving it the way we all do before we finally accept it from God’s hand. But during those years, I longed to go home, to return to God and to the farm. A starving little fox so hungry for grace.

In 2005, we moved to our farm. My husband had become a high school history teacher after fifteen years in the Army. Our daughters, Cami and Lacy, were in the fourth and sixth grades, our oldest son, Luke, in first grade. John and Joseph were busy toddlers. Along with mothering our brood of five, I was determined to become an author, not a farmer. But the California land in my blood called my name—had been calling me home since I’d left decades earlier for Reno, Nevada, where I’d gone to college.

After following my military man across a continent or two, it felt good to finally settle down and begin our life back home on a quiet country road near the Sacramento River where fruit and nuts grow in abundance. My parents, who lived nearby in the Sutter Buttes—the smallest mountain range in the world—had almonds, but we didn’t want to farm those. My brother Patrick, who owned the land beside us, was set on putting in walnuts and stone fruit— primarily peaches, as our grandparents had grown.

Once we cleared off the old almond trees in our front pasture, we put our horses out there to graze. We’d just moved into the house we built, and our living room windows looked over this beautiful field. Several weeks before Easter, a little red fox moved into the pasture with the horses. Early each morning while I sat and read my Bible, I watched her make her rounds, drinking out of the water tank and hunting squirrels under several old almond trees we’d left for shade for the horses. The fox appeared undernourished, and I remembered the fox story of the good man feeding his fox the eggs. So, after our annual Easter egg hunt that year, I gathered up all the leftover hard-boiled eggs, and every day I dropped several near her den—a large hole in the ground.

Pretty soon she grew used to me, and instead of running away when I stepped onto our porch, she waited under the almond tree near her hole, watching me. 

In the beginning, she wouldn’t touch the Easter eggs, but slowly they became her daily meal. At dawn one day as I was boiling eggs, about a month into this, I watched her carry what I thought was a cottontail to her den. Good for my little fox, I decided. She’s feeding herself now. I won’t have to keep making her eggs. Though, I’d gotten quite attached to caring for her.

Within a half an hour, I noticed her crossing the field again with another little rabbit in her mouth. Savoring my coffee, I stared out the window at the little fox’s comings and goings.

Watch her closely, the Lord whispered to my heart. Again, she trotted through the grass to a distant place and returned in a short while with another furry ball between her teeth. The sun had now risen above the hills beyond our pasture, turning the sky pink, washing light and warmth over the dew-covered grass. To my utter astonishment, when she came out of the hole, trailing her were four little kits tumbling over each other.

What I had thought were bunnies were really baby foxes!

She trusts you now, and she’s proving that trust by bringing her little ones under your care, the Lord said. Just as you are learning to trust me. Learning that trust comes with time, and the hand of grace that feeds you is tender.

You see, I was about to undergo a tumultuous passage. My past would have to be plowed before my future could be planted. Above all, I would need to trust the Ultimate Farmer: God. Trust being the first step of every journey.

#  #  #

I come from a long line of strong women with men issues. My great-grandma Delcie Mae, whom the family called Dell, walked to California beside a covered wagon because of a no-good man. When Dell’s daddy died, her granddaddy ran off with all the family’s money, disappearing down to Texas for no good reason. Dell’s grandma and momma went to Texas looking for him but never found the granddaddy.

Thus, two women determined to start over in California set out in a covered wagon full of little girls. Delcie had one older brother and a handful of younger sisters. The twelve-year-old brother walked beside Dell to California. The baby sisters rode in the wagon. One sister died on the journey after her nightgown caught flame in the campfire and she ran. By the time they wrestled her to the ground, she was badly burned and slipped away a few days later. I hold this against Granddaddy No-good and don’t like that his blood runs through my veins.  

But Dell’s momma, Elizabeth’s blood runs through my veins too. She became Granny Phillips when she was old and would fish on the Sacramento River with her grandsons, shaking her fist at any man who dared to move in on her fishing hole. They called it the “Glory Hole,” and Elizabeth Granny Phillips wasn’t about to share her glory with a no-good man.

“She was a fierce little woman, a hundred pounds soaking wet,” the keeper of family secrets once told me. “Men didn’t mess with Granny Phillips and her grandsons on the river.”

And right then, I dreamed of becoming Elizabeth Granny Phillips, fishing with my grandsons on the river someday, and shaking my fist at men without shame, without fear. Training up my boys and standing up to men who would run a woman off the river.

I absolutely adore the Sacramento River. It begins at a pretty little spring in Mount Shasta, a sleeping volcano, where I’ve filled a jug full of crystal-clear, ice-cold water coming out of the mountain and drunk it with my kiddos there at the headwaters of the Sacramento. The river runs down into the valley, twisting and turning, a swath of life wherever it flows. The Sacramento reminds me of a wise old woman who has learned to wear something down. Patience is a virtue that will serve you well. Elizabeth knew this. You just outlast people. She outlasted that no-good husband and the men on the river too.

At nineteen years old, I hadn’t outlasted anything yet, but I’d already learned the hands of men weren’t tender and couldn’t be trusted either. I’d arrived in Reno, Nevada, on the tail of a painful breakup with my first honest-to-goodness boyfriend. I call him that because not only did I give him my heart, but also gave him my virginity too, which seemed like all of me. Then, he dumped me and slept with other girls. I was devastated. But we got back together—after a month of his sowing his wild oats and a month of me sowing my wild tears—and tried again because I loved him so much. Still, our relationship didn’t last.

Just a few months after one turbulent year together, I was on my way to Reno alone, trying to outrun a broken heart. The Biggest Little City in the World—that’s what the sign says as you enter the strip of casinos that never close in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

And that’s where I’d do my first line of cocaine.

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