My husband and I grew up in a small town in California. It was a very small town. One (sometimes two) grocery store and the biggest shopping mall was a K-mart.
There you were either a farmer or you worked at the prison.
His parents were farmers with thousands of acres of land.
My family was weird. We had a beekeeper and a park ranger with a small three-acre farm. You know, because we needed a hobby.
Between our families we grew apples, peaches, pecans, pomegranates, wheat, cotton, and alfalfa. We also had cattle, pigs, goats, horses, chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, and lambs.
Our childhood was made up of hard work and constant learning. There is always something to do on a farm. So, we cleaned animal pens, dug holes, put up fences, learned how to give medication to unwilling animals, and grew gardens. We knew how to get our hands dirty. And we thought that every child spent hours outside every day.
By senior year, we were dating. My husband always wanted to go to BYU, so we both moved to Utah after high school. I went to UVSC (now UVU) and got a degree in teaching while he worked on one in mechanical engineering.
But something was missing….
As we grew, we were married and had children. We bought a house in Spanish Fork and put in a small garden.
We were going to teach our kids what we had learned when we were their age.
But, in a city, even a city as rural and tight-knit as Spanish Fork, a farm is hard to come by. And a small garden on a corner lot just isn’t the same as a few acres of land that you can call your own.
We loved the community….but we still needed something more.
As my husband drove home one day he noticed a For Sale sign at a property.
After calling me and promising that we were “just looking” we went to see what was behind that For Sale sign. It was more curiosity than anything else. We weren’t seriously looking to buy yet.
The second we set foot on the property we fell in love.
Everything about it, the home, the trees, the layout, the care that had gone into it all, screamed that someone had really loved this place. It was so very beautiful.
Though the crops were different, it felt like we had stepped back in time and become children again.
It felt like home.
When we moved in a few months and about a million prayers later, it was as if a dream had come true. We kept blinking, wondering when we would wake up. Even now we have to remind ourselves at times that it’s real.
As we met the Boyack’s (the previous owners) we realized that our first impressions of the property were absolutely right. They love this property. They planted and shaped each and every tree with care. They planned and maintained the home with tenderness, doting on every detail.
Their love for this way of life is evident everywhere we turn, a beautiful treasure instilled into the walls and the trees that will never leave though they have moved on.
Now, as we learn from them (they’ve been by multiple times to mentor us) and try to fill their footsteps we are realizing how big those footsteps really are. It’s one thing to care for an orchard so that peaches grow. It’s quite another to instill love into every action the way that they did.
We hope to honor the lifetime of work that it took to build the beautiful treasure right in the middle of Spanish Fork. To carry on their traditions. To learn and grow, just as they did.
And we hope to teach our children to do the same. To carry on the traditions of farmers through the ages and around the world. To work hard. Love our neighbors. See the sacred in every blossom and leaf. Rely on God. And understand that anything you do should be done with love and a sense of real duty.
We are so thankful for the Boyack’s. For the For Sale Sign my husband just happened to see.
And for this dream come true.