Today was a perfect day.  And as far as winter life goes for a couple of vegetable farmers in Wisconsin, that is not as usual as you may think.  Some days are lovely.  Some days are nice.  But many days are lost and moping and a little sad because our purpose in life is to grow things and it is drearily hard to grow things in winter in Wisconsin.  For the last two years, we’ve spent much of our life growing things and then cultivating relationships in our community as we try to sell these things and then when there are too many leftover grown things, our time is spent finding new and fun ways to eat them up.  So in the winter, though our time is more our own and life is a whole lot less hectic, we sometimes feel sad because we aren’t doing that thing that is for now our chief purpose in life.

But today was different.  Today, despite the lack of growing or selling or repurposing seconds of vegetables, was a very perfect day.  We woke up to snow.  The first snow in what feels like months because it has in fact been over a month.  We woke up with coffee and chocolates (well I did anyhow, because I can always eat chocolate—even at 8 AM) and worked on our seed order for the 2015 season which is not in fact anything like growing a vegetable but still allows us to look at pretty pictures of vegetables and imagine what it will be like to grow them.

We abandoned our wood-heated home for what was supposed to be a short seed catalog break.  We walked the pups in the state park woods near our house for hours.  We traipsed about in the half-inch of snow and reveled in the calm that a fresh blanket of snow brings with it.  We eyed up downed trees and dreamed of growing our firewood pile even higher.  We stopped in town for hot chocolates and hazelnut lattes at a gem of a coffee shop that we’ve somehow neglected in our 20 months of living here.  We sipped and got warm.  We returned home and reheated leftover New Year’s Eve ramen for lunch and got back to dreaming of vegetables and growing things and spring.  And it all looked very perfect in our imaginations because in your imagination, there are no droughts or floods or weeds, there is only perfection.

-Leek