Pets Family

It begins with mud and a season of mess. The month of March whispers warm days only to follow with bitter and biting wind, cruel reminders that change has not yet arrived. The skeletal and lifeless branches of our lilac bushes hold little hope. The space between their gnarled limbs and the lush fragrance of their spring flowers yawns like a deep, impassable chasm. This is the most frustrating part of change – being ready for something better, for something different, for something good, yet the path there is unknowable, impossible.

The ancient Greek and Roman playwrights had a solution for such things – a literary device called “deus ex machina.” Translation: god from the machine. When the characters in their dramas would find themselves in unsolvable situations, when that chasm of impossibility yawned in front of them, a god would be lowered via a crane and would solve the crisis with an improbable event. As writers, we are taught to avoid deus ex machina at all costs. It is considered a cheap and lazy way to resolve a story. We writers need to give honest commentary, and life just doesn’t work like that.

And yet, over the course of my writing career, I have sat with and interviewed hundreds upon hundreds of individuals. I’ve listened to hundreds upon hundreds of stories. And one consistency within these stories is something reminiscent to the sudden and miraculous events that we writers are taught to avoid. Over and over and again, I’ve heard stories of people in impossible positions – people who were stuck, people who couldn’t see a path forward. Time and time again I’ve listened as people say, “and then…” Time and time again from the most impossible places the unexpected happens – food appears in the wilderness, barren places suddenly grow life, seas are parted, and paths appear where before there were none.

I love my little farm, because if I pay attention, the world here has an honesty to it, there are things here that I need to see and understand – things that remind me that chasms do close. Things like spring sweeping color across the mess and mud of March and lilacs transforming like dry bones coming to life. n

Strawberry Blue Farm is a flower and fiber farm in Tecumseh strawberrybluefarm.com • @strawberrybluefarm