Untitled, ©2013 Jeane Vogel Studios

I know I’m a person filled with opposites.

I love being with people, but I prefer to work alone. I am down-in-the-ditches feminist, but I like to be home with my husband and kids. I’m a homebody with wander lust.

And I’m a city woman who needs a daily outdoors fix, preferably on or near water.

I lived on a farm for three years after college. Chickens, cows, garden, snakes, bugs… and whippoorwills calling at night. I baked bread and learned to split wood for the fire. I canned. I milked cows and collected eggs.  It was glorious and hard… and lonely. Earth Mother experiment over, I returned to the city.

But the land always calls. This week I got a terrific gift: an afternoon and evening at a friend’s flower farm about 75 minutes outside St. Louis. Who couldn’t love a flower farm? Good friends, a long walk around the farm, perfect light, wonderful dinner, bottle of wine, clean air, grape arbors, hay filled barns, joyful dog begging to play.

With all this wonderfulness, and time and subjects that would make most photographers weep with gratitude, all I could think about it how this land, this way of life, is going away. Development, pesticides, corporate farming, profit, and just plain thoughtlessness about the future is stripping it away.

Thanks to Vicki and Jack of Flower Hill Farm, for being stewards of the land, for filling my home with flowers, and my heart with joy.

Untitled, Flower Hill Farm, ©2013 Jeane Vogel Studios, Digital Infrared