Growing Fast & Growing Slow

My daughter is almost eighteen.

Eighteen.

How the hell did that happen?? I remember so clearly so many events from her childhood, and they all seem smooshed together like they happened over the course of a few weeks.

Time is weird like that. Twenty years shoots by in the blink of an eye, and to paraphrase a wise man, if you don’t stop and smell the roses once in awhile it’ll pass you by.

All the work and new invigoration into Helios this year has been really good for making me think about time passing. For too long I thought of the farm as, I don’t know, this static bubble in time I guess. Always there, never changing. But then I look back at some old photos and realize that the saplings in those photos are now fifty feet tall. Time leaves no one behind, that’s for sure.

So as Kelly and I begin to make plans for Helios as agrivoltaics instead of agriculture, we’re thinking about what we want to do with the five acres of homestead. Obviously Mom still lives there, but we’re thinking about putting a small cabin at the other end of the property, somewhere we can call our own and plan longer stays now and then.

But also we started looking with a critical eye at things like landscaping. Right now there are quite a few maple and poplars, as well as scads of cedars. That was Dad’s doing. The man loved cedar trees. I loathe cedar trees. five acres of grass and growing up I could never walk barefoot because the entire grounds is littered with dried out razor-sharp cedar stickers.

But I love fruit trees. I’ve always in the back of my head dreamed of having a small orchard. So this past weekend we took the first step. Turns out you really can order anything through the internet—FedEx happily shipped us half a dozen 5# fruit trees! Four apples of two different varieties, a peach, and a pear.

So yeah, super excited to get these little guys in the ground. Mom’s been helping out making sure they get plenty of water. Most of them should start to bear fruit within two or three years. On one hand that seems like a lifetime; where will we even be in two or three years? Will the solar farm be under construction by then? Molly will be halfway through college. What changes will happen in the world between now and then. It’s hard to conceive.

But then I think at how fast the last twenty years have blurred past, and I realize that I’ll be eating my own apples a lot sooner than I realize.