I’ve always loved this photo. Taken at the Chicago Botanical Garden, in the summer of 2003, shortly before my life changed and I became a cancer patient. I was 26.

I really believed, at that point in my life, that I was grown, that I understood most things in life, that I was set on my path, and that I would magically someday wake up with a full novel ready to flow out of me effortlessly.

Also, I looked cute.

20 years have passed since that photo was taken. I often divide my life into three big sections: the 25 or so years before cancer, the 20 years since that first diagnosis, and the unknown future.

Since that photo was taken (on a film camera, developed at a photo lab, and scanned into a digital format), I graduated from law school; became a newspaper reporter; got married; started a garden (that grew into a farm, that grew into a bigger farm, that grew into a farm business, that currently feeds and houses my family); birthed two babies; moved to Canada; had cancer again; and never once submitted any of my writings to a publisher. I am in the process of changing that sentence.

Currently, my family and I live in a little blip of a town near the Bruce Peninsula of Ontario.

My children are teenagers, and my bonus kids from my husband’s first marriage are grown and working on families of their own. My husband and I spend most days tending to our crops, selling mushrooms at the local farmer’s markets, and trying to carve out time to hike, canoe, camp, fish, and eat good stuff.

I’m always looking for ways to spend time in my native Indiana, and usually make it back there a couple times a year to visit family and the fields and forests of my youth.

I write every day, because I don’t know how not to. I love to read.

There is just never enough time for all the stories out there. I find that both annoying and liberating.

I used to think I could save the world.

Now, I mostly just focus on the ongoing conversation that happens between all our souls, all the time.