It is amazing what a three year old remembers.  She remembers bottle feeding the sheep last year and everything about our farms.  We have a game as we drive home through the countryside back to our apartment and look at houses and farms and design ours.

She is adamant that she will have sheep.  They will be black, she says, and she is going to milk them!  And when the babies come out of their mommies she will be there to snuggle them and give them a bottle.  She also wants a brown horse, a small one in case she falls off.  She will wear a cowboy hat and yell, “Yee haw!”  She tells me this in her adorable young words and hand motions and intense animacy.

We talk about gathering eggs from the chickens and watching the ducks swim.  Our goats and Papa milking them.  We talk about cooking in our farm kitchen.  This child is amazing to me.  We have the same dreams and same ideas.  I am aware of how very young people are still opinionated but I have never seen one plan in so much detail.

She remembers how to plant seeds and how we water.  She knows that the sun and the moon help the seeds grows and she pretends to water.

We will be renting a 5×20 community garden plot for $200 just so we can get our hands in the soil.  We have had lots of offers to garden in other folks’ yards but I love the idea of conveniently riding my bike down in the evenings with the little girl in tow and watering our garden plot together and seeing what beautiful things are ready to be turned into dinner.  It will be quite a shock after gardening two thirds of an acre but a necessity.

There are many things I try and tire of.  Guitar lessons, language lessons, but some passions never fizzle out.  And for me and Maryjane (and Doug too) farming is a part of our very makeup.

So this summer, should you be driving past Flat Acres Farm in Parker you may likely glimpse a view of Maryjane and I watering our gardens, breathing in the aromas of soil and growth, and enjoying the sun.  Farm where planted!