The Nighstands

It was July 11th, 2020, when I pulled into our new would-be homestead in Cornville, Arizona. I was behind the wheel of a U-Haul truck so full, packed feels like a lie of omission. The base of the furniture dolly was sticking out the back, and our five hens rode shotgun with me in the cab.

This was the start of a dream—ours.

I wish I could fit into one story what it took to get here. The scaled drawings of our 3-bedroom home in Phoenix, turned into a game of Tetris—furniture inside of furniture, stacked wall to wall, ceiling to floor. All to make it in one trip, 109 miles and 2,350 feet up into the trees. The same drawings were done for the Casita we planned to turn into an Airbnb—based only on measurements from our single walk-through before making the offer. Those drawings became blueprints—down to the board and wire, the tax-included price of the bathtub. Every inch was planned because it had to be.

We cashed in every chip we had. We were operating on faith, excitement, a fierce budget, and a whole lot of spreadsheets.

And yet, it worked. Perfectly? Hardly. But beautifully enough. Signing for the keys, picking up the truck… we could hardly speak through the gratitude.

After unpacking, Jill asked me to get rid of the furniture left behind in the Casita—a couch, a bed, an office chair and two nightstands. I loaded the couch and bed, but paused at the nightstands.

Jill calls our style organic vintage meets farmhouse—this might as well be a foreign language to me. Still, I saw their function. And in that moment, form and function became more than a design choice. They quietly revealed themselves as my role on the homestead.

Jill’s, fittingly, has always been aesthetics.

We needed nightstands. I decided to keep them and let Jill talk me out of it later, if needed. After all, they were nice—less than high-end, but certainly crafted with care.

So I grabbed a rag, started dusting off the spider webs—important detail, because missing that step would’ve sunk my case—and then I saw something that stopped me.

Stamped on the bottom of both matching nightstands, in small bold type, was a number:

5142.

That was our old street address. The very home we’d just emptied. The one the hens and I had just pulled away from.

I stood there holding one end of a dusty nightstand, completely stunned.

It’s impossible to know what that meant. But I know how it made me feel:

Held. Affirmed. Seen by something bigger.

Like the path had rippled backward to say,

You’re here. Keep going.

—

From my book-in-progress, Grow and Tell

Piles

In all my years of gardening—and as a nod to the reductionists out there—I’ve distilled “the secret” down to one word:
Piles.
Put anything in a pile, and it must—seemingly by law, but certainly by witness—become a host to life.
Buckets, pots, rocks, dirt, sticks, wet towels, dishes, irrigation tubing…
Anything you gather and leave in a pile will welcome life.
Chop and drop. Leave the leaves.
Piles.

—

From my book-in-progress, Grow and Tell

Untitled

From the mountain we all tumble,
And begin to take our form.
Paradigms feel solid as rock—
yet even stone forgets its source.

Perfect already,
we fracture, roll, and round,
unique as every stone
becoming
infinitely diverse grains of sand.

—

From my book-in-progress, Grow and Tell