It’s the day after Halloween, All Saints’ Evening. A long day’s end comes to a holy close around a campfire on Spring Forth Farm’s home site. The three year house building process, from purchase of land to Certificate of Occupancy, inspection, and appraisal has been a long journey of extraordinarily hard physical labor and dedication: blood (injuries), sweat (12 hour days in humid summer), tears (disappointments and tasks gone wrong) and unexpected joys, but today Spring Forth Farm passed inspection and received its CO. Hallelujah!

Flower farmers and home builders Megan Cornett Leiss and Jonathan Leiss, husband and wife team at Spring Forth Farm, bear extraordinary witness to sustainable living and artistry of the land.  Named “Homesteaders of the Year 2016” by Mother Earth News, (http://www.motherearthnews.com/)these slow-flower, solar farmers have much to teach writers and artists. As a practicing writer who stitches together the structure of a stand-alone essay, story, or chapter sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, I feel an intimacy with the process of watching these two build their home, debt free. Step by step, beam by beam, nail by nail, and prayer by prayer, the saints seem to bless the work of their hands. May it be so for us all (Psalm 90:17).

Blessing of the land before breaking ground, 2013.

The finished house, 2016.