08/17/2026
Today my brother Jordan would have been 37.
Eleven years without you.
Eleven seasons of birthdays and holidays and ordinary Tuesdays. Eleven years of wondering who you would have become. What you would have loved. What you would have built.
What would you have grown in all those seasons of your life?
God, I miss you.
I think, in so many ways, this farm has become my way of emerging from the devastation of losing you.
Not by moving on from my grief.
Not by letting it go dormant.
But by turning it over like soil.
Again and again. Every day. Every season.
I pour my tears into this ground and ask it to make something beautiful from an immense loss. I plant things. I tend things. I watch things bloom and wither and die and decompose and somehow become the very thing that feeds whatever comes next.
Maybe that’s what grief has been teaching me all along.
Death isn’t separate from life here.
It’s the foundation of it.
Today Bawking Betty died. And Emersyn said, “Now she can be part of the tree with Nicholas.”
My children believe that everything that dies eventually becomes part of a tree.
And honestly, I hope they never stop believing that.
We talk about death here. We say the word die.
I used to hate that word. It felt too harsh. Too final. I wanted softer words. Passed. Lost. Gone.
But now I see death everywhere.
And I don’t think it needs to be softened.
On a farm, death and decomposition create the fertile soil beneath our feet. What dies becomes food for something else. What falls apart becomes part of the earth. And eventually, impossibly, something grows there again.
Death is sacred here.
Grief is safe here.
Tears are gathered here.
And something I’ve noticed is that, without really advertising it, the people who find their way to Poppy are so often the grievers.
The ones who have lost someone.
Lost something.
Lost a version of themselves or a life they thought they were going to have.
The ones who sometimes want to pound their fists into the ground from the sheer pain of it, but have learned to swallow it, tidy it up, make it more comfortable for everyone else.
And somehow their feet bring them here.
Continued in comment
