I wish that I had something better to say, but I am living in a war. I am still at my old place here in Alachua, working and working like the girl with brothers turned into seven swans, toiling like she toiled over that last shirt to try to get out and get away and be free at last and not burned alive at the stake to please the evil queen mother-in-law.

It feels haunted here, like a vortex of spiteful, greedy energy hovering around everything. I find myself deep in the depths of Moria, fighting the goblins. I am still struggling out of the ogre’s castle. People who were my family for almost two decades are trying to strangle me off of resources and take everything away from me. I never know what to believe, what is true….

“Don’t worry about losing the farm. You put so much time and energy into it, it’s yours. You never have to worry about leaving if we get divorced.”

“I’ll always support you and the children. I’ll go above and beyond what the courts say I have to give you.”

“I love you. You’re my best friend ever!”

“You have until December to find a new place and move.”

It all sounds so reassuring.

But things are just disappearing. I come back, and suddenly the sawzall I need to cut kindling is gone. One of my tires has a slow leak, and the air compressor is missing. Our food processor disappears. It’s not enough to get everything I’ve put energy into for my entire adult life, all the gardens and the pastures and the home I designed and helped build….they have to have my food processor too!

I have been going through our financial records and making unpleasant discoveries about where our money was spent and how we got so much debt. It’s expensive to buy fancy things for your pregnant girlfriend to impress her with your providing abilities AND support your existing family.

My daughters need things. They need clothing, ballet shoes, food, medical appointments. We still have animals – the dogs, the cats, the cows, the pigs, the poultry, the goats, and they need things too. Instead our resources are going to buy sweet potato starts for someone else’s garden, lumber to build other children things, dog food for a dog who doesn’t live here, salmon dinners and fun beach vacations.

A few weeks ago, his family informed me by text right when I was very sick with a cold and still out twisting on fence clips, that even though they had told me I had until December to stay and figure everything out, they changed their minds and decided suddenly that 11 months was plenty of time for me to get a loan, get permits, rebuild a homestead on empty land, build a house, and move my stuff and all the animals over, while living an hour drive away and taking care of dairy animals and a homestead all by myself and being a single mother, and I need to get myself completely GONE by July 15th.

Hilariously, these are people that have one of those IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE:  SCIENCE IS REAL/BLACK LIVES MATTER/NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL/LOVE IS LOVE/WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS/KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING signs at the top of their driveway.

(They will have to legally evict me, which takes at least 90 days, and would be complicated by the fact that I am still legally married into the family, but at no time have they ever asked if their granddaughters and I will have a place to live).

On top of this, Ethan quit his job that was keeping him travelling away from The Girlfriend, but didn’t bother to tell me. I only found out when I asked when he was travelling again for work, and was informed he wasn’t. I am overtaken with moving, building, maintaining. There is no time for me to work at a job and support us until after we are moved. It is an anxious time. Very, very anxious. I don’t understand why everything has to be made so difficult! If I were him, I would be doing whatever I could to help us move and get settled, so he can set up with his new family, and get me out of the way, but that would be too nice! I think he wants me to regret wanting a divorce.

I just can’t regret it though – despite how they are treating us. Maybe if Ethan had been just a slightly better man over the past ten years, I MAYBE would be a little bit sad. Luckily he took every opportunity he could to be as horrorshow to us as possible, making it so incredibly easy to emotionally walk away, and I have none of the grief that usually comes with ending a long relationship, only a queasy, unsettled kind of feeling to realize it really was just as bad that, and yes, I did waste a huge chunk of my life with this person. Even through all the fatigue and anxiety, I feel this glow of happiness; pure, golden happiness, to be free. I have realized that a prison can feel comfortable – but it is still a prison! Shedding all these inauthentic relationships and toxic people is like being cut free from some terrible burden I had gotten used to carrying around, like chronic pain.

It feels so hopeful to work at my new farm. It is beautiful and peaceful there, and there is a feeling of magic and beauty, like there used to be here. Maybe it is the feeling of the land being loved. I have this feeling that the land is welcoming me there, wanting me to tend to it and work with it. Instead of being crushed down, I am bringing my focus to creating a new life for us, a beautiful life abundant with fruit and food and flowers. I am looking forward to working more in my community, and sharing the knowledge and experience I have accumulated. I am giving up, falling back into faith, faith that we will survive, that we will be led forward to something better, faith in the intangible forces that bring us into better, truer versions of ourselves.

Here is my new garden! It doesn’t look very impressive, because it’s not. I am still figuring out irrigation details, but it feels so good to have my hands in the dirt again, watching these plants grow.

I have more starts to plant, so it will grow!

I am having fun designing plant communities. Here are blueberries and blackberries interplanted with longleaf pines.

This is a place for citrus, where it will be sheltered under the oak trees during the freezing winter weather. I am interplanting it with turmeric, pineapple, ginger, and malanga (taro). In between I have mushroom logs to fully use the space.

I have over fifty fruit trees planted, including some unusual things like mayhaws, jujubes, and low-chill cherries. I did lose some, but most are doing well and putting out new growth. I am planning to grow commercial-scale medicinal herbs in between the trees, starting in the fall.

I am moving my flowers over, and planting a beautiful perennial and annual flower beds. I have all kinds of roses with herbs like rosemary, marjoram, lavender, rue, sage and skullcap. I am working on designing a moonlight garden, of plants that bloom at night and smell sweet, like gardenias, angel’s trumpet (brugmansia), white sage, moon flowers, night blooming jasmine, etc. I’ve always wanted to plant a garden like this!

I am working hard to welcome my animals here soon! I can’t wait!