Big Things Often Have Small Beginnings

When I posted this photo of a tiny, purple flower on Facebook back in 2018 with the caption, "Big Things Often Have Small Beginnings", I really had no idea what was in store for me or the farm. I had one, singular lavender plant alone in a bucket at the entrance of my house. At that point in time, I had never even considered opening a farm for guests to pick lavender. That part of my vision was still very fuzzy.

I just had a vague idea. A possibility of a farm, really. The more I daydreamed, the more the idea came into focus.

That Facebook post was my way of sending out my message to the universe looking for signs. And the signs appeared.

******

We were knee deep in the planning of my younger sister's wedding during the spring and summer of 2018. She was getting married in our barn that October and the barn was, to put it mildly, a total disaster. It was definitely not ready to host a wedding.

The loft was waist high with moldy hay - a remnant of a horse business that existed in the barn many decades before our arrival. The main level was still storage for the misfit tools and pieces of equipment that managed to escape my cleaning out over the years. The basement was a dungeon with poor lighting and stalls overflowing with scrap pieces of wood and furniture.

Mike and I worked together to build a bar and add some fun elements for her big day. She's my baby sister after all, and we wanted her wedding day to be magical but it also provided the motivation we needed to see some projects get done.

An old workbench that had been sitting in the barn for years served as the bones of the bar. Rotted siding that we replaced on our house that summer sat in a heaping pile and was calling out to me to be repurposed. We used the trimmed down boards, layered with 100 years of paint,\s the vertical pieces to dress it up. Mike cut a plywood top and I covered the bar top with lathe strips that we had (likely from something that had been dismantled years before). I dig up three quarts of old paint that wasn't completely dried out. Red. White. Blue. I stuck my brush in and decided to paint a flag as I was ten strokes in.

Like everything else around our property, the result was quirky, fun, a little lopsided, but filled with the good vibes from materials we found lying around the farm, that we dusted off and whipped into shape with our own two hands.

The summer came and went and we checked projects off the list in preparation. Just weeks before the wedding, heavy rains brought roof leaks in the barn. A steady stream of water found its way from the loft to the main level.

I stood in the barn and watched the water drip onto a table where we planned for guests to dine and thought, "This might be the push I need to go all in". A new roof on the barn wasn't in the immediate plan but if my eventual goal was to pump new life into it, now was as good a time as any. The old roof was stripped off and the new roof went down.

The morning of the wedding was chilly, and drizzling rain. I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that by the time it cleared up and the bride was headed down the aisle, the tables in the barn were just as beautiful and dry as when we set them.

The bar was a big hit and the epicenter of fun that day. It looked like it had been there forever.

The entire day was filled with joy. I think the efforts of an entire family coming together to make a wedding happen adds so much more meaning to the actual day.

As the afternoon was winding down, my mother urged Mike and I to dance. We had been working so hard to prepare, it was a rare moment to reflect on what we had accomplished. While we we dancing among our family, my parents close by, Mike leaned in and asked, "Is this what you envisioned?"

I knew exactly what he meant. Since the day I laid eyes on our property, I could see joy, people gathering, life being celebrated, breathing in peace and breathing out worry. I looked around and couldn't help but tear up.

I didn't have a farm yet, no business plan, no money made, but I felt like I had already accomplished what I set out to do. I think the rest is just falling into place.