Before any of this — before the garden, before mushrooms, before Chris even — I trained in fashion design and spent years working as a seamstress. This is my chapter, so I'll write it in my own voice for once.
I loved the craft of it. There's something genuinely satisfying about a pattern coming together, about mending something instead of replacing it, about understanding exactly how a garment is built because you've built one yourself. I want to say that plainly, because it would be easy to tell this story as a straightforward escape narrative, and it wasn't. I was good at what I did, and most days I liked doing it.
The part that started to itch
What wore on me wasn't the sewing itself. It was how disconnected the whole industry felt from anything I could actually see or touch the source of — fabric from one country, cut in another, sewn in a third, sold somewhere else entirely. I started caring more and more about where things actually came from, and a sewing studio wasn't really the place to chase that question all the way down.
So I started volunteering. First for a few weeks at a time, then longer. Small farms, homesteads, places that grew or made most of what they needed. I brought my sewing machine along more than once, mending things for whoever needed it in exchange for a place at the table.
I didn't set out to become someone who cooks. It just turned out to be the thing that stuck.
What actually shifted things
It wasn't one dramatic moment. It was an accumulation of small ones — a farm that fed me the best meal I'd had in years, made from nothing but what was in the ground that morning; a habit of asking hosts to teach me one thing in the kitchen before I left; meeting Chris at a retreat center sink, both of us elbow-deep in the same pile of dishes. Somewhere in that stretch of seasons, cooking stopped being something I did to get by and became the thing I actually looked forward to.
I went vegan somewhere in the middle of it, not as a rule I decided on in advance but as the natural end point of cooking mostly vegetables because that's what was growing. I still sew — I make and mend most of what I wear, I still take on the occasional project for someone else — but it sits alongside the cooking now instead of ahead of it.
What I kept
I kept the eye for detail that sewing gives you, which turns out to be useful for almost everything: reading a recipe the way you'd read a pattern, noticing when something's slightly off before you can say why. I kept the belief that made stuff should last, should be repaired rather than replaced, should come from somewhere you can point to.
What I didn't keep was the distance. These days I can walk out the door and point to where dinner came from, and that's the whole point.