Once upon a time, Jeremy and Paige were each given a career assessment test which, based on our skills and interests, predicted a career path that would best suit us as individuals. Fortunately, both of our profiles came back with “Farmer” as the chosen occupation. And so we farmed. The End.
As you can probably imagine, our path to farming wasn’t quite so simple. Instead of three sentences, it would take volumes to trace our journeys from ‘What I Want to Be When I Grow Up’ to where we find ourselves today, for in between the two are adventure and marriage, friendships and pain, death, laughter, time, life and love.
In actuality, when I took the test it recommended I choose either law or high pressure sales (who writes those tests?), and nowhere mentioned what I really wanted to be: an FBI agent (I would be remiss to not mention here that Jeremy wanted to be a spy). So I headed off to college. Jeremy had the same idea and individually we accrued some rather costly degrees then married and jointly accrued a couple more rather costly degrees. Between the two of us, we had degrees in education, communication, psychology and religion. We were qualified to teach, talk, counsel and preach.
We tried on a number of hats - pastor, teacher, marketing director - all interspersed with the seemingly mandatory service jobs of waiter and valet. We taught, talked, counseled and preached. But life experiences have a way of changing the way we see things, bringing us to the realization that in actuality we were basically only qualified to learn, listen, feel and trust.
Many moons and a giant step of faith landed us on an island with a subsequent offer of an agricultural land lease and an opportunity to wear a hat that we had previously worn only as part-time growers in our backyard.
And so we farmed.
We outfitted ourselves with boots and began yet another chapter in the Book of Us. These days, you’ll most likely find us doing that learning, listening, feeling and trusting that we’re so qualified to do while tending to rows of vegetables and fruit trees. As for our kids, the offspring of a wannabe FBI agent and would-be secret spy? Well, them you may not find at all.