In a few hours a snowstorm will hit this farm. This means one of my favorite mornings of the year is about to happen!

After sunrise I’ll head out and blanket the mare and fill her pole barn with a whole bale. I’ll carry more hay up to the sheep shed, too. The pigs will get a whole nest of hay and breakfast, and the chickens will get their feeders topped off.

Once everyone is sated, I will return to the farmhouse and gear up my hawk and head out into the first flurries of the day to take her hunting. Working up a sweat running through the woods with her. Feeling cold air fill my lungs and my legs still able to carry me across the landscape.

Once she’s done and fed, we will both go back inside. I’ll set her on her perch, and take off my sweater to dry. I’ll get coffee, an epsom salt herbal foot soak, and find a cat for my lap. I will read a whole chapter. I will stretch in a way I was told was “too much”. I take up all the space I want now.

Then I’m making buttermilk pancakes, eating as much as I want, and then retiring to the fireside to read while the world blows wild outside my window.

Taking the day off to rest. Taking the day off to heal. Taking the day off to be grateful I made it through November and managed the mortgage on time, that’s three months I haven’t fallen behind. Incredible. You have no idea how long I have been working towards this. Well, some of you do. Some of you have been reading my story for 2 decades now.

…And tomorrow I will shovel and rake roofs and promote pet portraits and pork, and tomorrow I will figure out how to earn some money and believe a better future for myself is possible.

But today: Snow, books, and warmth.

This was the life I always wanted. Not money. Not a fancy car. Not travel, or kids, or expensive clothes. I wanted a Tuesday morning of wild adventure to be my norm, a life with animals and trees. I want to be cold and tired and covered in hay and sweat and lanolin, just to better enjoy the soft return to stillness and warmth in the home I built for myself, by myself, however humble.

It’s been the work of my life to get to this uneventful weekday morning. And I never, ever, will take it for granted.