family – Eden's Edge

I almost didn’t write this post.

Not because I don’t have anything to say. I always have something to say. But because putting this winter into words means sitting with it long enough to find them — and honestly, I’ve been too busy surviving it to do much reflecting.

It’s May now. I’m only just coming up for air.

Here’s what the last several months looked like.

It started in the fall. Epstein Barr — the kind of exhaustion that gets into your bones and doesn’t negotiate. I was still fighting that when late November hit and a neck injury decided to join the party.

I was already two fights deep when a week after Christmas the first bottle baby arrived. A kid — tiny, loud, needing feeding every few hours around the clock the way newborns do whether you’re healthy or not.

January brought Influenza A. And then on the 21st — right in the thick of it — the second kid arrived.

Late March. Triplets.

Five bottle babies total. In the house. All spring. And a Dysautonomia that was progressing in ways I was still trying to understand, dropping my blood pressure without warning and taking me down with it.

I want you to picture that for a second.

Epstein Barr. A neck injury. Influenza A. Progressing Dysautonomia. Two bottle baby goats in the house by January needing around the clock care. An Alaska winter outside that does not care about any of your problems.

And then three more in late March.

I have never been so simultaneously exhausted and kept alive by something in my entire life.

I couldn’t have done it alone. I want to say that clearly because I spent a lot of years believing that asking for help was a kind of failure and this winter dismantled that lie completely. People helped with animal care. People showed up. And I am grateful in the bone-deep way you can only be grateful when you genuinely needed something and someone actually came through.

We lost a few ducks. We lost a turkey hen. I won’t pretend that doesn’t hurt — every animal on this farm matters and every loss is felt. But the goats made it. The kids made it. The flock held. The farm held.

I held.

Barely. Slowly. On the days when my body fainted and my neck screamed and my energy was so depleted I measured it in minutes rather than hours — I held.

Not because I’m strong in the way people mean when they call disabled people strong. Not because I have some inspirational relationship with suffering that makes it meaningful instead of just hard.

Because I’m stubborn. Because there were animals that needed feeding. Because five bottle babies don’t care that you have Influenza A and they will absolutely scream about it until you get up.

It’s May now.

The kids are growing. The farm is still standing. I am still standing, slower than I was in the fall, quieter than I’d like to be, still finding the edges of what this winter took from me and what it left behind.

But still here.

That has to be enough for today.

Because tomorrow there’s more to do.

And I’ll be here for that too.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

People see the farm and think they understand what it takes.

They think about the physical work, the feeding, the mucking, the hauling, the endless list of things that need doing regardless of what your body is doing that day. They think about the money, the feed bills, the vet costs, the infrastructure that always needs something. They see a disabled woman farming in Alaska and they think, that must be so hard.

They’re not wrong.

But they’re not seeing the whole cost either.

Let me tell you what this farm actually costs me.

It costs me animals.

Not in the abstract. Not as a farming fact of life that you get used to and eventually stop feeling.

I never stop feeling it.

Every animal on this farm has a name in my heart even when it doesn’t have one on paper. Every one of them is part of the mission, part of the reason Eden’s Edge exists, part of the chain that gets real food to real people who need it. They’re not just livestock. They’re the whole point.

When I lose one I fall apart.

Not gracefully. Not with the stoic acceptance people seem to expect from farmers. I fall apart the way you fall apart when something you loved and were responsible for is gone and you’re standing there holding the weight of that and asking yourself every question you don’t want to ask.

Did I do enough? Did I miss something? Was there something I could have done differently?

Why do I try?

Why don’t I just quit?

I have sat with those questions in the mud more times than I can count. I have cried over animals in Alaska winters when the ground is frozen and the wind doesn’t care and there is nobody around to see it and nowhere to put the grief except into the next thing that needs doing.

And then — after the meltdown, after the questions, after the falling apart —

I try harder.

That’s the only answer I ever find. Not a philosophical one. Not a comforting one. Just get up, figure out what happened, do better, try harder. The mission doesn’t pause for grief and the animals still need feeding and somewhere out there a family is counting on what this farm produces.

So I get up.

Every time.

It costs me freedom.

Financial freedom first, because there is no such thing on a nonprofit farm run by a disabled woman in Alaska. Every dollar that comes in goes right back out. Feed. Supplies. Infrastructure. The endless hungry mouth of a working farm that is also trying to feed a community. I am on disability. I am poor. I built something that serves everyone around me and I do it on the financial edge of what is survivable.

I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because people need to understand what nonprofit actually means at this level. It doesn’t mean comfortable. It doesn’t mean funded. It means you believe in the mission more than you believe in your own financial security and you make that choice every single day.

Personal freedom too. The farm doesn’t take days off. It doesn’t care about flare days or fainting spells or the fact that your neck has been screaming since November. It doesn’t care that you’d like to sleep in or leave for a weekend or have one day where nothing needs you.

Something always needs you.

I gave up the version of my life where I answer only to myself when I built this place. I knew that going in. Most days I don’t regret it.

But I want people to know it was a choice. A real one. With a real cost.

And still.

Still I am here.

Still the meltdowns end and the questions find their answer in the next thing that needs doing. Still the financial edge hasn’t swallowed me yet. Still the freedom I gave up feels, most days, like it went somewhere worth going.

This farm costs me everything some days.

And some days everything I’ve given it comes back in the face of a kid that made it through the night. In a senior who tells me they haven’t had real meat in months. In the particular silence of a farm at dawn when everything is fed and nothing is wrong and the thing you built from stubbornness and grief and refusal to quit is just… there. Alive. Working.

Worth it.

Ask me again on a bad day and I might hesitate before I answer.

But I’ll still answer yes.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

Tag: family

Still Here. Albeit Slowly.

What This Farm Costs Me