Jan 3rd, 2014

We drove South from my sisters in Illinois,away from the -11 degree weather and headed for our first WWOOF farm, Yokna Patawpha Bottoms, down in northern Mississippi. We watched the temperature rising as the miles fell away, and the snow cover on the ground got more and more shallow, and then more patchy. By the time we finally rolled into Oxford in deep darkness, we could feel it was warm, but we didn’t see that we’d completely left the snow behind us until the next morning.

We chatted with our host Doug for a bit and then went to bed in our new room – a cozy, carpeted, and welcoming upstairs space lined with books that I’d like to read, interspersed by rocks and pleasant decorations. Amongst them, facing the entryway, was a single fortune cookie fortune.

I burst out laughing when I leaned forward and read it – because the exact same fortune had been the one thing of mine we left behind in our old bedroom in Minneapolis, as a message and blessing to our friend Jacque, who was moved in the day we left town.

I’d wedged it into a crack along the wall facing the entrance to the room, so it would greet her as she entered – just as the exact same fortune greeted us here:

Aaaaaah! Love!

– Gabe