Jason and I don’t spend much time apart.  It’s the nature of living and working together.  While intimate knowledge of each other is an innate part of marriage, it’s a bit more, say, pronounced in ours.  Not only do we know what makes each other tick, we know exactly when we’re going to tick and all the background info that went into each tick.  As intense as it is, you get used to that sort of thing.  Eventually, that kind of transparency becomes a comfort, and something that you sort of take for granted, until…well you know the cliché.

So I headed off to visit my family in Michigan alone while Jason attended a retreat in Maryland with a bunch of strangers (or, at least they started off strangers).  The thing about family is that you know them and love them and they know and love you, but it lacks the intensity—the transparency—that I’ve grown accustomed to in my marriage.  I don’t mean to say that this is a bad thing—after years apart growing in our own directions, I highly doubt the same kind of intensity or transparency would be beneficial.  I mean, my family is intimately (and dare I say intensely) aware of a distant part of me.  It is not an unimportant part of me—they know how I came to be.  They even created some of that.  And to a certain extent, I know them. But childhood is an innately selfish existence.  You don’t really know the people in your life outside of their relationship to you.

Once they release you to the wild unknowns of the world to continue “becoming”, it all gets a little more nebulous.  You fill each other in on the major plot points on the phone or during brief visits, but you don’t see all the background information that led up to the plot points.  You no longer truly see each other.

So, after three and a half days apart, Jason and I found ourselves reunited and reacquainted with the transparency of each other…and within walking distance to the little quaint downtown and its neighborhood bars. It was an instant celebration.  We laughed hard enough to push tears into out of our eyes and delighted in the presence of being truly seen and truly seeing.  We were drunk on love.

All of this delight and celebration led to more of the same until we accidentally were drunk on more than just our love and found ourselves stumbling along the unrecognizable streets of my childhood home to sheepishly shuffle up to bed like guilty teenagers with no more than a quick wave to my befuddled parents, who hadn’t borne witness to the background details that led us to this abashed plot point.

We are still harvesting crops for markets. We are still deconstructing, cleaning up, and putting away the debris of this year’s season. We are still “putting the farm to bed”.  We are still planning next year’s crops.  But in the greenhouse, the next season has already begun.  In the greenhouse, we are already sowing the seeds of next season’s fruits.  In the greenhouse, we have already moved past this year’s mistakes and heartbreaks and into the swelling hope of the new year.

This is the farm life.  This is the cyclical nature of things: the sped-up version of birth, growth, decline, death, decay, rebirth.  That even when things get crazy around us, even when we’re cleaning up the wreckage, we still have to stop and sow the seeds of the crops we wish to reap-a, everlasting metaphor for our human lives.