Grow from what you know, but never let it determine your fate.

My story is about travel and letting life take you where you need to go. In 2019, that mantra brought me back home to Little Rock, Arkansas, to be with my father as he got sicker with cancer. They gave him six months, but life had other plans, as it does, and he lived six whole days instead.

I come from a large family, and in a cruel twist of fate, my nieces had lost not only their grandfather but also their dad in rapid succession. Seeing that my calling was now here, being with and supporting my family as I could, I began planting roots at the family house, which happened to include six acres of fortified land.

When Covid took hold of the world, my nieces Delaney and Phoenix took to the land to pass the time and encourage growth - we all needed it more than even I could appreciate at that time. I was used to gardening on my balcony in Maui, where the elements are kind, and things grow year-round. When I enlisted my nieces, we all had to learn how to manipulate the ground using the elements afforded us.

In several short weeks, we had planted squash, tomatoes, greens, flowers, eggplants, jalapeños, literally anything we could get in the dirt. Several weeks after that, we added chickens, ducks, rabbits, turkeys, goats, and bees, and shortly after, we lost some of those ducks, chickens, and rabbits as we learned about the harshness of life - prey and predator. In addition to the losses of Lil’ Wayne (a little chick), Boots (our favorite duck), and Two Boots’ reincarnations, we had to navigate bugs that were hellbent on destroying our garden.

Our takeaway was simple - life is hard and offers a lot of grief. What you do with the information is what makes all the difference. And so we persisted. We got more innovative and more invested in harvesting our dream, vowing to each other that we were ‘all in.’ And we are. And Murder Farm was born.