“It’s ridiculous how much I love my life,” Maura Lynn says, as she’s picking colorful pumpkins and squashes from their vines and piling them into a wheelbarrow. Our younger son and I had chosen this particular fall-y-feeling morning to take her up on her offer to visit the farm where she works.
Our island is rural, forested, and hovering over breathtaking ocean scenes. Every angle of nature here is photogenic and every person has a fascinating story that they have time to tell. Put the two together and you feel like you’re living a fairytale. This morning with Maura Lynn was just that – a storybook experience.
We had imagined visiting the farm for an hour or so but I had a feeling from the start that we wouldn’t want to leave. Maura Lynn greeted us at the gate and for the next three hours the feeling I had was a mix of deep serenity and luxury. Luxury because here we were, unexpected and spontaneously appearing, and Maura Lynn treated us as though we were slated as guests on a private, in-depth, educational day tour.
The garden in its last days of October still sparkled with fuchsia dahlias, antique pink straw flowers, purple calista fuzzballs, and purple globes of cauliflower. Still lush, velvety green in the low morning sunlight streaming through the distant, surrounding trees hugging the edges of the property, the garden is Maura Lynn’s love, pride, and joy.
As an illustrator and sculptor, Maura Lynn has lived the artist’s life. As a carpenter – working, dressing, and talking like a man in a man’s world – she’s lived the breadwinner’s life. (While her husband, a special-effects expert, embraced stay-at-home dadding.) But today, as she walks us through the beauty of the land, picks tulsi herbs to make us anti-stress tea, and educates us about every gardening caveat we ask about, she is in her most fulfilling role.
There is nothing rushed. No undercurrent of busy-ness that needs attending to. It feels like she is ours. She teaches us about biochar; the flora in our gut; the interconnectedness of trees. She tells us how most Indians, living in cramped communities, have a little tulsi-herb garden in order to drink the mild tea made by pouring hot water in a cup of the fresh herb. Fittingly, tulsi won’t allow a person to internalize stress, says Maura Lynn.
She has answers for every question I have. And she engages with my shy-seeming son so well that after awhile he’s busily picking pumpkins alongside her as I’m losing myself in deep thought while photographing the grandeur of it all. In fact, I think I was in some other realm for our last half-hour there because, in the deep peace and luxurious timelessness of it all, I can’t even recall where my mind was.
In the last four years I’ve tried unsuccessfully to have a thriving, family-feeding garden on our property. So here, among herbs growing for essential oils, food growing for organic consumption, and flowers growing for sheer eye candy – all in a place where its owners strive for clean food and conscientious land-steward education – I feel deep contentment and an overwhelming desire to stay. I want to know what Maura Lynn has learned. I want to grow this kind of lush abundance. And I want my home to have a place like this that just feels so good to stand in and soak up.
My son initially didn’t want to come. He was actually crying as he fought the idea. Though he’s our little seed-collecting, plant-growing botanist-to-be, he had other plans for our morning. Because he homeschools with me in the mornings, he often gets to dream up what he’d like to do during our free hour. But because he goes to school half-days during the afternoons, we both found ourselves lamenting the fact that we now had to go.
Maura Lynn graciously left her vine-pulling-to-make-compost and helped my little boy gather and carry all the garden treasures he had collected through the morning. We reluctantly buckled our seat belts, said profuse thank yous, and drove away feeling deeply serene, my son crunching a fresh zucchini all the way to school.
