place

Our farm is our real classroom.

It is 40 acres of fields, meadows, trees, and streams to walk over, crawl through, climb up, and swim in. 

It is there for us to explore and investigate, and we spend as much of our free time as we can exploring and investigating it.

There is a stream that runs along the back side of our property line. 

We like to stand barefooted in it on summer afternoons and feel the smooth rocks against our heels and the wet sand between our toes. 

We stand as still as we can and look at the life living just below the surface of the water. 

We talk about all the things we feel, see, and think.

Our farm gives us all the space we need to run freely until the calves of our legs throb achingly and the cheeks on our faces glow brightly. 

When we want to see how the little world around us is living or passing on, changing or staying the same, growing or fading away, it gives us place to walk at our pace and ask questions, researching ideas, making hypotheses, doing experiments, and showing our findings. 

Yep, it gives us our own space, our own room, to be us, to be Carver and Carter.

Our school is a long way from our farm so when we get there in the mornings and back here in the afternoons we’re worn out from walking dilligently the four miles to school and the four miles home. 

We walk eight miles each day to school and back home. 

And that is how my story begins.

- trevor scott barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020