Maybe So

A Taoist parable, adapted for the life I’m actually living.

I am not a farmer. I am a gardener. And after six years of watching, this spring gave us more than we planted.

We arrived on this wooded hillside, settled, rooted, built a life — and the place kept moving underneath us. We didn’t leave. It left. Or is leaving. We birthed children here. Seven years of pastoral land surrounding us, and then Musk bought everything around us. We’re literally boxed in.

The wildflowers came without being asked. An unusually wet spring, and suddenly the garden was full — native plants, verdant, unhurried. Near the fence, Chappy’s birdhouse gourds climb toward something. Ada’s cucumber vines are already thinking about pickles. I didn’t plan any of it. I just kept showing up.

We’ve begun the process of keeping bees. It would help us keep the land too. But there’s already a wild hive living in a hollow cedar at the edge of the woods. They’ve been there for years. They chose it. They didn’t wait for us to be ready.

My mother planted a hedge of evergreens along the hillside. A buffer against the view. It feels like a hug.

The studio has north light and custom sliding glass doors. Starting over is always an option. It just carries its own weight.

The kitchen renovation ran out of money. The mortgage doubled. We invested in staying, and now staying costs more. We chose this over a different kind of life.

Chap calls this place his forever office now. Maybe it still is our forever home. He carries it all the same.

We are two people with legitimate reasons to stay and a slow accumulating weight of reasons to go. The decision stays suspended — neither fully staying nor leaving — which is its own kind of drain. The hilltop is still ours. The buffer is still unbuilt. But the relationship to the land has already changed because we know what’s coming and we’ve watched it happen on every side. I’m grieving something that’s still technically there.

Until construction starts next door, I’m still in the not yet.

I leave the driveway and the road tells me what my mind keeps negotiating around. Semi trucks. Gravel trucks. Dump trucks drifting over the yellow line. My body registers it before I do.

But I come back. I walk in the garden. I slow down, breathe, move through the studio. I’ve learned I’m best when I’m slow, present, making something.

The neighbors are still talking. Maybe so. Maybe so. Maybe so.

And then I look into my children’s eyes — bright, clear, utterly beautiful — and I find the thing that doesn’t need a maybe-so. Joy and grief both bring me to tears. I trust that. I know it. It is bigger than most things, bigger than the land question, bigger than the road. It is the one thing that is not suspended.

The farmer watches. The gardener tends. And sometimes, in the eyes of her children, she sees infinity.

maybe so, maybe so, maybe so.