Dear fellow humans,

Years ago, I wrote a weekly farm newsletter. It was supposed to be fairly basic: Here’s what happened on the farm this week, here’s what you’re getting in your CSA share, yadda yadda. But of course I waxed and waned about all sorts of other things. And what I realize so many years later is that it was a kind of emotional anchor, a personal clock. If I didn’t write, my body felt slower; my brain, muddier. Then I began to write for a living, which changed my relationship to the idea of those weekly musings. I also left my farm and my marriage and had another baby—all of which changed, well, everything.

And so I have simply not felt capable of any kind of regular newsletter. Until now.

My little family and I made a pretty gigantic leap back in June. We moved from southern Arizona—my beloved desert home of 16 years—to western North Carolina, land of waterfalls and misty mountains, very near to the place I went to college. We live in the woods, on a mountain, out past where the cell phone signal drops, within minutes of any number of lakes, creeks, and rivers. My desert children are learning about mountain seasons—Leaves change colors! These puffy things we wear are called coats! A creek is not the same thing as a lake!—and we are all discovering the many layers of change and growth.

But, real talk: It’s a hell of a thing to love multiple places. As I wrote in a recent Guardian piece about leaving Arizona and the climate crisis:

“The desert is a permanent stone in my chest, a heartsick ache. I miss the alleyway prickly pears growing like weeds, the mesquites with their crowns of thorns, saguaros bursting with fruit, palo verdes dropping yellow flowers over the sidewalks, those wily coyotes hunting stray cats, all the rusty human treasures washed and buried in the arroyos, the smell of creosote just before it rains, heat like a hairdryer, the Windex-blue sky that goes on forever.”

So, I’ve got one foot in the Arizona desert and the other in the North Carolina mountains, and I’ll be doing my best to write across that physical-emotional divide. Alas, welcome to Earthside Broadsides, a place for periodic musing and pining by yours truly, and for occasional writing-related announcements. I have several projects in the hopper, and I’m terrible at/allergic to self-promotion, so I’m hoping this might help keep folks in the loop. I definitely won’t write weekly (let’s be honest—no one wants that), but I will attempt monthly or quarterly.

If you’d like to hear from me occasionally, consider subscribing.

xo

Debbie