Hey there. I’m so glad you stopped by! I hope you’ve found this site to be a space of encouragement, hope, or inspiration for your family culture. If you’re like me, you want to know the writer behind the posts or books, and I’d love to know you too! Please reach out and share your story so we can pray and grow together.

To begin, though, I have to clarify that none of my writing is about or because of me — my background is really the story of the hand of the living God writing the story of my life. Without His unmistakable presence and intervention through all my length of days, drawing me back when I wandered and being my shelter when I needed, I would not be here to write about faith, family, marriage, and place. To God alone be the glory.

But to share a few details of myself: I was born with a pen and notebook in my hands. From earliest memory, when asked, I would declare the wish to “be a writer,” when I grew up. Old journals and stories fill boxes in my basement and cover my desk, and you will never find me without a book in my bag or every room in my house. Growing up in a Christian homeschooling family in the nineties provided ample imagination time and laid the foundation stones for the blueprint of a strong family that would become my life’s work.

Kenny and I married in 2008 while he was still in the Marine Corps and we were living in California. It has been through the covenant commitment of marriage that the Lord taught me the depth of His love for humanity as I learned be experience the Gospel truth of dying to self and taking up my cross to follow Jesus while facing down the alcoholism and chronic pain he left the Marine Corps with. By God’s grace, our marriage is stronger than it began and he has been sober since 2024. You can dive into or support encouragement and resources for wives of alcoholics on my Substack.

We homeschool our only daughter on our small homestead in Ohio, using much of our work and rural experiences in our living education. Her horse and poultry projects keep us busy while I try to keep up with the garden and Kenny with our building project requests, all while growing and cooking entirely from scratch in the Wise Traditions fashion. More about that side of our lives on our family website, Buckeye Homestead.

While I love to travel, two factors have grounded me in the sense of place that has become very influential to my writing: a husband and daughter who do not like to travel, and owning a homestead with animals that literally root us to the ground. God in His wisdom knows what is best for us, and were it not for these things I perhaps would never have known the influence our literal place in the world has on our souls and the stories that build us.

But creation stills calls me outdoors, so when the endless housework or cooking that dominate a homesteader’s life do not tie me indoors, I will be out. We even do school outside when it’s not too windy for papers! Once or twice a week will find me hiking with my dogs, an activity that I find to be very essential to percolate the deep thoughts always swirling in my brain and allow the treasure to rise to the top. Like Longfellow, I feel the pull:

“O gift of God! O perfect day:

Whereon shall no man work, but play;

Whereon it is enough for me,

Not to be doing, but to be!

A Day of Sunshine