Two Years Ago This Weekend
Two years ago this weekend was the first time we stepped foot in Parkersburg, WV. It’s also the same weekend we put in offer in on the property that is now our farm. This picture is from that same weekend. It was horribly cold and that’s Sean’s happy face.
Thanksgiving weekend marks two years since we first came to this property. We didn’t arrive with some grand plan. We weren’t touring farms or chasing a dream. We were leaving a life that had stopped making sense and needed somewhere that wasn’t suffocating us. Being here made the next move obvious. Not dramatic. Not poetic. Just a clear break from everything that had been grinding us down.
Before we got here, the holidays were chaos disguised as celebration. Travel shoved between deadlines. Obligations stacked on top of exhaustion. Schedules that shifted because other people needed something. Nothing steady. Nothing controlled. Just another reminder that our time wasn’t ours, even during a season that’s supposed to slow down.
This place gave us the first clean line out of that pattern. It didn’t fix anything by itself. It didn’t solve the pressure or the burnout or the routine that had been swallowing our days. It simply gave us land where the life we were trying to build could actually exist. That was the shift. Not emotional. Just practical reality finally matching intention.
Driving back to our former life after seeing our soon-to-be farm felt pointless because we already knew we weren’t staying in the old routine. Once we saw this property, the direction changed. Not because of inspiration. Because continuing where we were made less sense than starting from scratch here.
Two years later, Thanksgiving weekend functions as the timestamp. Every piece of this farm: the hutches, the fencing, the breeding lines, the feed systems, the freezer full of what we raised exists because of that weekend. It’s not a sentimental anniversary. It’s a marker of when our real life started.
We’ll acknowledge it the same way every year now. We’ll cook a rabbit from our herd, that was born and raised on this farm by us and only us. It’s not symbolic or romanticized. It’s the cleanest expression of what this land produces and what our labor delivers. No middlemen. No illusion of abundance. Just actual food grown by our hands on the same acre we chose that weekend.
Two years in, the routine is stable, the work is ours, and this weekend is nothing more than what it has earned the right to be: the moment the old life ended and this one took over.