My husband was on stateside military orders to attend a school at an Air Force base on the coast. The kids and I stayed home in Alabama. We had just come back home after spending a wonderful beach-side Christmas with my soldier for a blissful three weeks. It was January 2020. If we had known what was about to transpire in the coming weeks after our return trip, we might never have gone back home.

Hi, my name is Kimi, and I’m an accidental farm girl.

So we’re sitting in the middle of a pandemic. We’re quarantining, social distancing, flattening the curve. Just hanging at home, hoping and praying this will soon all be over.

And then it wasn’t.

I remember very distinctly, this conversation with my husband, telling him I wouldn’t be able to travel to see him for Valentine’s Day. You have to understand, when you’re on orders, whether abroad or stateside, school or combat, the world a soldier lives in just isn’t the same as the one we live in back home. The military had yet to adopt any major quarantine protocols, or at least any that had reached my husband’s ears as of the moment, so he was mostly unaware of what was going on with the rest of the world. All he did was eat, sleep, and attend this rigorous training. He basically had no life outside of attending this school. We kept pushing back the date for our next visit, and we ultimately didn’t see each other in person again for over five months. Add to that the isolation of quarantine and not being able to even leave the house to grocery shop, because I wasn’t about to drag my kids into that minefield, and my life was beginning to look ever more lonely. Sure, I had video chats with friends and family over the phone and Internet, but it wasn’t the same. All my once-normal activities and routines had been thrown out the window.

The kids and I needed something to do. We’re all at home together anyway, so we might as well do something productive together, right? I found a home improvement store with free delivery service for cinder blocks, gardening soil, and fertilizer, and the kids and I got to work on my first garden. I’m a plant killer by trade, or so I thought. People would gift me with plants, and they’d almost immediately give up the will to live. I killed plants that thrive on neglect. So, going into this whole gardening thing, I didn’t have a whole lot of hope that this would even work. I thought, “Well, it’s at least something to do, and if we get some tomatoes out of it, so much the better.”

Well, we got our tomatoes. We also got cucumbers, peppers, green beans, and pumpkins! I was astounded. And I was hooked.

Working with my hands, learning about soil quality and companion planting, seeing those tiny shoots sprout from seeds to something we could eat, and feeling like I had a little bit of food security was nothing short of miraculous to me. God had given me a gift in those tiny seed packets, in the middle of my backyard, during a pandemic where people were increasingly hopeless. Food shortages, supply chain issues, the fear. You could see it in people’s eyes and hear it in their voices. I was lonely, but I wasn’t without hope.

I had hope. I wasn’t helpless, and I knew I could do more with my hands than just this starter garden. I wanted more.

I wanted chickens.