Bringing the Past Forward

Tammy is our newest Team Writer. This is part one of her story….We have all had dreams, and ended in a different reality, or are passing through, which is not to say worse, often much better. Yet different.

*Before you read Tammy’s wonderful story I just wanted to let you know I’ve signed up

for Jeff Goins 15 Day Great Writers Challenge. I’m doing it over at my Book Blog – OR is a button on the front page here to take you direct to ‘The Avalon Journals’.

Ok settle back now and get to know Tammy

Tammy writes ‘Bringing the Past Forward….We build our homestead, slowly making changes in our lives to have a lesser impact on the environment and a greater impact on our community, I look back at my childhood. This was not my childhood dream, any of them. I was going to be a lawyer, a horse vet, competitive equestrian rider; I was going to be rich and famous, maybe a linguist and work for the UN. No where in there was a hint of being a crunchy granola mama. My kids, if I had any and it was a big if, were all going to boarding school in Europe, because you know homeschoolers were those freaks on the fringe of normal, acceptable society.

I laugh at those childish dreams. I have grown up a bit here and there, I have come to realize that my ideals and prejudices are so unrealistic. It has taken years to get to this point in my life where I am returning to my roots. My dad’s parents were farmers and my parents always had huge vegetable gardens. My earliest memories I enjoyed it so much, playing in the fields with my cousins, picking produce, climbing apple trees and sneaking off to play other games. Summer time in Virginia was awesome for the beginning of my life.

After my mom’s dad passed away we did a stint of time living in New York with my grandmother. Daddy turned part of her well manicured lawn into raised beds. He had to have his veggie garden in amongst my grandmother’s award winning flower gardens. She was not too happy about it but did enjoy the fresh produce.

Here I was introduced to a totally different way of life. Not the slow and easy rural life with my dad’s side of the family. A faster paced suburban/urban life. I decided that this was the life that I wanted, though I did want a horse farm as the end result. I wanted to live the high society life.

We returned to Virginia and settled in a subdivision, the big deal? This was a new concept to the area, housing developments began popping up all over the place, many of the old farms disappeared as the next generation decided they didn’t want to farm. Of course now I realize that many of them just couldn’t afford to continue running the farm, corporate agriculture had taken a very firm hold. Technology jobs were taking the place of agrarian. This did more to reinforce my ideals than anything else.

Fast forward from the late 80s and early 90s, I met my husband online. What a scandal that was at the time. Online dating sites hadn’t even begun then, though there were chat rooms galore. The internet was burgeoning and coming into its own. It was a package deal with him and so my life as a partner and a mother began. My way of thinking began to change slowly from the get rich, live the life of luxury and all that.

We moved around quite a bit and then settled back in Virginia when I became pregnant with our first child, our daughter Claire. I looked to my mother and my mother in law for assistance in this very new stage of life. I had been a step mom, to Rebekkah whom I will always count as my daughter, for two years but this was a little different. My mom, ever the hippie at heart, and mother in law both said it would be better to breast feed and then make my own baby food when the time was right.

Subscribe now so you will not miss part 2….
Light, Love and Peace!

Tammy.