Today I took down the fence I had made to go around my flower garden. It felt GREAT to tear that thing down! The flower garden was so hard to mow around and my Grandmother was constantly complaining about how ‘awful’ it looked with grass growing all around it. (I didn’t mind it, but who cares what I think right?)

below is a picture of what the fence looked like when it first went up:

The fence was made of logs (buried a foot into the ground), some old telephone wire wrapped around the thin logs, and chicken wire wrapped around the bottom half of the ‘fence’. Although this fence didn’t keep ALL of the animals out, it did a great job of deterring most of them from eating my young seedlings (and tasty adult flowers).

Below is what the fence looked like just a few weeks ago. After two years or hard work, the logs were leaning, the wire was drooping and slipping down, and the grass was claiming more of the garden than the flowers.

Honestly, I liked the grass.. I don’t think that it’s was my place to tell the grass not to be here, and I actually used the grass as greenery in a lot of my flower bouquets. Everything in nature has a purpose and I like to keep that in mind when I’m planning my future gardens.

The picture below is what it looks like now in all of its free and wild glory.

It’s messy, it’s wild, and it’s free. Exactly the way it should be..

While I was taking down my fence, I felt almost giddy as I took the logs out and wrapped up the wire (you can still see the wire left around the bottom that I couldn’t pull away from the grass, but everything else is gone). It was about half way through the destruction process that I started to realize how much this fence represented how I felt in life..

These past few years I’ve felt trapped, dependent on others, and just plain stuck in life. I have had all of these ‘amazing’ plans for life, but no way to achieve them. My plans always revolved around someone else (whether a boy or a best friend), and it normally involved needing other peoples help to achieve said plan. However, much like how the fence in my garden is now down, allowing nature to roam free and do what it’s supposed to, so shall I.

This past year has been rough. I have learned a lot of lessons and I have learned what it truly means to depend on myself. Going forward, I do not plan to rely on others to achieve MY goals. My goals are my own, and if someone wants to tag along on my journey then they are welcome to join, but I must remember that my journey is my own.

I have always known that things don’t always work out the way we think they should. Heck, that is practically the motto for any Military Family! If life has taught me anything about relationships/friendships, it’s that people are only in your life for a reason, or a season (often times both at once), and that even ‘friends for life’ are not constantly there.

So I am taking the fences down around my sole (even though the fences around my heart will be there for much longer) and I’m allowing myself to feel more free. Stress and worry will still have it’s weight on me, but ‘stress in a condensed area’ has more weight than ‘stress spread out and free’.

I have worked hard by myself to save up for a farm of my very own and it is honestly making the journey that much better. Although my future farm is a bit further off than I wanted it to be, it is still going to become a reality. The first step? Taking down the fence to my flower garden because I won’t be planting flowers next year. At least, not on this property anyways.. 😉

As always, I want to remind people to smile, have an amazing day, and remember that everyone moves at their own pace. Five years ago, I thought I would have a farm, a family, and that I would be done with college by now. I certainly didn’t anticipate how bad my anxiety would get the first two years of being back home. Nor did I anticipate a world wide pandemic sweeping across the world.. When life gives you sour lemons, remember to add plenty of sugar to the lemonade! ❤