The Home we Already Had

Our son Liam has been persistenly asking for "four willer" for Easter. He doesn't seem to understand that we just don't have the money. Even if we did, I'm not really a fan of adding more worry to our plates. There was a time when I was like Liam - too young to fully understand. It was the 1990s.

There was a single-wide mobile home, green and white, with lime green appliances and brown berber carpet that hid stains better than it had any right to. That was home. Not the house my Dad was building — the one going up board by board in the yard, the one that would eventually have 2 bathrooms and a real foundation — but the place we lived, all of us together, closer than comfort usually allows.

I didn’t understand then what I understand now: that the singlewide was enough. It was small and it was ours and my mother moved through it like it was a kingdom she had chosen, keeping it, holding it, holding us all together. She was home most of those years in the way that some mothers just are home — the fixed point everything else orbits. Later, when we got older and more expensive in the way teenagers always are, she took a job at a local restaurant. She didn’t announce it. She just went. That’s the kind of woman she is.

My dad is a complicated man. I love him without reservation, and I’ll say the next part with the same honesty: he has always been a functional alcoholic, and that meant life with him had edges you learned to navigate. But here is what else is true — I watched that man build a house with his own hands. Not hire it built. Build it. And one evening when I had been ungrateful in the way children can sometimes be, asking for more than there was, I looked out the window and saw him sitting on the unfinished stairs to the second floor, head in his hands, crying - likely wondering when he’d have the funds to finish the house he’d started a few years earlier and get us out of the trailer. 

I have never fully recovered from that image - A grown man. My father. Sitting on the steps of something he was making from nothing, for us, and weeping in the way people weep when they are alone and think no one can see. I don’t know what exact weight broke through the surface that evening — whether it was my ingratitude or the bills or the exhaustion of building something after a long day of working to pay for the materials to build it. Probably all of it. Probably things I’ll never know. But I saw it, and it changed something in me that has never changed back.

—

My son Liam is a good kid. He doesn’t understand why we can’t buy a $7,000 ATV for him and his brother, and I can’t be angry at him for it because I was him once — standing in that singlewide wanting more, not yet capable of seeing what more was costing the people around me. Children aren’t supposed to see that yet. That’s not a failure of character; it’s just the mercy of being young.

But I see it now. I see it every time I look at the nursery books.

Wild Things Nursery is either the best decision I’ve ever made or the one that breaks us — and most days it feels like both at the same time, held in tension the way you hold something fragile you refuse to set down. This is our first full spring season. The groundwork laid for the years ahead. The website live. The bills, though, are coming due in a way that doesn’t care about the beauty of what we’re growing here or the soul of my nephew standing in the middle of it all. The bills just come, relentlessly.

My parents were here once. Not this exact place, but this exact feeling — the struggle, the gap between what you’re trying to build and what you have to build it with, and the question underneath everything: will it be enough?

I used to think my dad’s tears on those steps were about failure. I know better now. They were about love pushed past its comfortable limit, love that had run out of easy options and was still showing up anyway. That’s not failure. That’s the whole thing. That’s what it looks like when someone refuses to quit on the people, they’re responsible for.

I am my father’s son in more ways than I used to claim. I have his persistence and unwillingness to quit . I am out here on 108 acres trying to bring back a native ecosystem that most people don’t know existed, selling plants to people learning to love their land, doing prescribed burns and timber work to keep the whole thing alive. Some days the nursery feels like pure hope — like something Jordan helped start that has a life of its own now, reaching toward light the way natives do when you finally give them room.

Other days I sit with the numbers and I understand, at a bone-deep level I didn’t have access to as a child, exactly what my father felt on those steps.

—

Maybe that’s the inheritance that matters most. Not the house he finished building. Not the carpet that hid the stains or the lime green appliances or any of the material things we wanted and sometimes got and mostly forgot. The inheritance that matters is this: you stay. You build anyway. You let your kids see you work without letting them see you break — except sometimes they see you anyway, through the window, when you don’t know they’re watching.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s even necessary.

Liam will understand someday. Not because I’ll sit him down and explain it, but because life will show him, the way life showed me — through a window, on a set of steps, watching someone he loves refuse to give up on something that matters.

I just hope when that moment comes, what he sees in me is worth what it cost him to wait for it.