the road ahead

I started this blog—a little reluctantly—a number of years ago primarily as a place for my customers to check if I was going to be in the garden. Tomorrow will be my last day there, but since this blog has in the intervening years grown into something that is also for me, a record, a diary of sorts, a place of reflection, I am planning to keep at it and allow it to develop into new avenues (with grass in the middle), if need be.
I would be very surprised if I didn’t start another food business in the future, I do enjoy it so much, the cooking, the experimenting, the talking, but as I close this chapter of my life in order to embark on other things, with a good set of skills and recipes invented and developed in the last seven years, I also enjoy the fact that I am able to stop without precisely knowing what it is that is actually starting for me.
A number of years ago, after being in a particular job for about four years, I realized that I had done as much as I could do in that environment and that I was ready to move on—yet I put off the decision because I was not sure where I was heading, for a month or two, another few weeks, until I was hit by a car one evening as I was about to cross the road. I have come to think that the accident happened to get me on the move, and it certainly did—although I was initially quite immobilized.
I am looking forward to tomorrow as a celebration of the five lovely years spent in Knockvicar organic garden, rather than a sad occasion. I loved my weekly sojourns there, I loved the routine of baking weekly, building the earth oven and letting it become part of the landscape, meeting so many people, the sharing, making friends. Doing something you love is a great way to meet lovely people.
When I was growing up I wanted to own a junk metal yard or a hardware shop, I wanted to farm, I wanted to travel, I wanted to write, I wanted to make things, I wanted to run a restaurant that opened once a week or a salon de thé, I wanted to speak a lot of languages, I wanted to be able to stand on my head, I wanted to fly. Some of these wants turned into my life. Since I am forty-five the sentence ‘life begins at forty-five’ has been going through my head these last few weeks, but life starts again every day, if you will.
In the three weeks I have taken off before this last market apart from organizing the children’s return to school life, I have been working with paper and cardboard, making interesting little objects, and thinking about the book I am meant to have completed by the end of this month. What I do know, bread will still be baked weekly here as the sourdough that was the lynchpin of maison djeribi is to be kept alive, and we do love the bread we make. What I also know, I am going to learn new things, new tricks, invent new routines, and I am quite excited about what these will be, Oh yes.

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