a little love story ❤
I wish I had a picture of those original flyers, but alas, I don't, so here's one from 2022 :)
Eleven years ago, I saw John’s face for the first time.
He was smiling from a flyer that was magnetized to a freezer in a local coffeeshop. I had knelt down to magnetize a flyer to the same freezer, and there he was. I was not pleased.
It was March 2013. I had moved to town to help my friend start an organic vegetable farm.
I didn’t know the area, so my friend took me flyering as a way of showing me around (FYI, this is a great way to get to know the local businesses).
We were putting up flyers for our organic veggie farm, one of the few in the immediate vicinity. Or so we thought.
Until we saw John’s flyer, hanging from the freezer. He and his friend were starting an organic vegetable farm also, not quite in the “immediate” vicinity, but close enough for us to rankle a bit. In the very small customer base of people who actually purchase vegetables from farms, there was now a whole other farm in the area.
Every where we went, their flyer was there first.
When I submitted a press release to the local newspaper, theirs came out the week before. It read “John just got back from three years in the Peace Corps, and Stefan is a Zen Buddhist monk.”
“Ugh,” I thought, “they sound so nice.”
Well, turns out they were nice. We met them in March, at a local Foodshed Alliance meeting. We liked them right away and began doing trivia together at the local bar.
Life unfolded and bloomed and went to seed and sprouted and unfolded and bloomed some more, and nine years later I found myself walking down the street with John, holding hands and clutching flyers.
We walked into that very same coffee shop where I saw his face for the first time, asked permission from the owner, and knelt down to magnetize our flyers to the freezer, faces smiling side by side.
Life’s fun that way, ya know?
yours in fateful flyers,
Amanda
P.S. If you want to be one of the amazing people that purchase veggies from farms, check out John’s farm, or my friend Malaika’s farm (the one that started it all). If you don’t live nearby, find a local farm!