Lifelines

Beginning this blog it seems only right to tell you a bit about me. I am in my sixties, and have lived on the Northern California Coast since 1966. I had a child at home in 1969, when I was way too young to know what I was doing. Fortunately for me he is a great guy.
I am happily married and have been for almost twenty years. I looked for my soul mate for a very long time. Had I known he was out there I wouldn’t have bothered with all those other guys.
I worked a myriad of jobs over the years. The cost of living is high here and it seems that it always was, so sometimes I worked two or three jobs at a time. In the seventies a friend of mine and I had a business called Toad Hall, where we had movies once a week and music on the weekends. I made friends with a lot of famous people at the time and loved the music world, but it almost ate me up, and left no room for the home that I knew my son needed, so I gave it up.
I taught high school for fifteen years, both food service and peer counseling. I have been lucky to become friends with some of the folks who were once my students. I still love it when there is a big event in town and a former student emerges out of the crowd and gives me a big hug.
I married my husband in the early nineties and retired from teaching in the mid nineties. My husband was a real estate broker, so eventually I became one too, only to discover that it wasn’t a great profession for me, so in 2003, I started a tea company, and here I am.
We live in a small house with a big yard. I have just read The One Straw Revolution by Fukuoka, and am now trying constantly to find those vegetables and plants that will most happily grow in my yard. I have been casting seed around the yard with great abandon to see what will happily grow. We are raising six chickens so that we can improve the soil and I am enjoying the newfound benefits of mulching my plants and trees with straw and alfalfa.
I have a pretty good start. I have a lot of roses, pear trees, a nectarine tree that actually produces small nectarines, calendula, kale, snow peas, oregano, lemon balm, mint and potatoes. There are other things growing, but those are the most successful.
I have been working on listening to my intuition instead of trying to bulldoze my way through life. Some days it works.
.Communication is my great love. Maybe it’s why I love tea so much, because a good cup of tea seems to lubricate great conversation. It took me a long time to learn that communication is talking and listening. Sometimes I still forget.