About Me

Hi! I’m Carey, and this is my little corner of the internet.

I’m the kind of person who always has snacks and a spare band-aid tucked in my bag, just in case someone else needs them. Friends often call me when life feels heavy, though I don’t always remember to ask for help myself. Most mornings, you’ll find me in the garden—hands in the dirt, mind quietly sorting through the day ahead.

I’m full of contradictions. I crave solitude but feel guilty taking it. I fiercely protect my kids’ joy even when carrying my own heartache. I dream of traveling but convince myself I’m “not that type of person.”

At my core, I’m someone who notices. Flowers pushing through the soil. The way light falls across a loved one’s face. The little details most people rush past. It’s in those details that I find both beauty and meaning.

Seed Catalogs and the Art of Dreaming

The seed catalogs started arriving in December. I didn’t order them — they just appear, like they can smell the desperation of a gardener trapped inside by winter. Baker Creek. Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Burpee, because I’m a basic suburban-adjacent gardener and I’m okay with that. I keep them in a stack by my reading chair, and on these cold January evenings, I flip through them like other people flip through Vogue. Except instead of fantasizing about designer clothes, I’m fantasizing about a garden that produces so many zucchini, I have to start leaving them on neighbors’ porches under cover of darkness. ...

Christmas tree in the farmhouse living room

Christmas in Grandma's House

The ornaments are up. Not all of them — we don’t have a tree big enough for my grandmother’s full collection, and honestly, I’m not ready for some of them anyway. The little ceramic angel she painted in 1987. The photo ornament of my grandfather, gone twenty years now. Those are still in their boxes in the hall closet, wrapped in tissue paper and waiting. But the tree is up, strung with lights and hung with the mismatched collection of our life: the “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments for each kid (Emma’s is a pink bootie, Thomas Jr.’s is a tiny baseball glove), the handmade salt dough stars from Sunday school, and yes, a few of Grandma’s — the safer ones, the ones that don’t make me cry. ...

Learning to Slow Down (Or: The Apple Butter Incident)

I ruined my first batch of apple butter. Let me back up. Tom’s parents have this apple tree — a Granny Smith that’s been producing since before we were married. Every fall, they bring us more apples than any reasonable family could eat. The kids take some in their lunches, I make pie, and still we end up with a bowl of them slowly wrinkling on the counter, reproaching me with their sad little apple faces. ...

First Tomatoes and Small Victories

We got our first ripe tomato yesterday. I know, I know — this is not newsworthy. People have been growing tomatoes since forever. But you have to understand: I genuinely did not think this would work. I planted the starts in May, when the soil was still cooler than it should have been. Then we had that weird cold snap in early June that turned half my pepper plants to mush. The neighbor’s cat decided my raised beds were his personal bathroom. Emma “helped” by watering the tomatoes approximately seventeen times in one afternoon. ...

Hello from the Farmhouse

I’ve been putting off starting this blog for about three years now. Every time I’d sit down to write the first post, I’d convince myself I had nothing interesting to say. Who wants to hear about a Kentucky mom making banana bread and pulling weeds? The internet is already so loud — why add to the noise? But then my grandmother passed, and Tom and I moved into her farmhouse with the kids, and something shifted. ...