The Captain & The Gardener
A Little Girl Dreams
When she was a little girl, growing up in the city, Patti used to dream of living in a cabin in the woods. She was the kind of kid who could sit in her back yard and be entertained by the life happening all around her, the birds, bugs, and flowers, the strange world that seemed tucked away under the real one of people and cars and houses. She carried this dream with her wherever she went. When she visited her great-grandmother in the country, she would find new details to incorporate into her dream, as though she were plotting an escape, but as she got older the dream matured and deepened, growing from a playful fantasy into a sense of who she was and how she wanted to live, of what life itself could be. And then, one day, she met someone who carried the same dream around in his heart—a young man who, while she was in the back yard imagining her cabin, had been on the living room floor building his own out of Lincoln logs. He worked on the river, but on his weeks off he would come sit for hours in the cafe where she waited tables, and it wasn’t long before they were dreaming together.
The Captain & The Gardener
They bought a little house in a creek valley, where the hills tossed and rolled like the manes of wild horses, where the earth was dark and rich, where the sunsets lingered and the nights overflowed with stars, and they planted a cypress tree out front on the day they were married. Over the next 40 years, it grew with their family—four daughters, all told, while he worked the river and she worked the land. They lived on little until they had more, a baby strapped to her back while she ran a tiller, the house always growing in fits and starts each time he came home, and slowly their life together became a dance in her eyes: coffee and tea, night and day, form and function, home and gone. They were guided by a vision that spoke from the deepest places of the simplest things: the smell of freshly turned soil, the juice of an apple running down your chin, your daughters splashing and squealing in the creek at high noon. They were apprenticed to the art of living—apprenticed to joy—and all their powers bent towards it.
Patti’s Place
It all began with a family, a young couple with an idea of what life could be, but all these years later and Patti still didn’t have her cabin. For her the dream had never died, but over time it had taken new shape and meaning. Now, at the end of a long improvisation, where each problem and joy had been met and fully embraced, it became a chance for her to express all that she had learned with her family, to create a space from her dreamer’s heart, and to share it with the world. That space is Patti’s Place—your cabin in the woods, crisscrossed with songbirds, cool in the shade of cypress and pine, the product of two people whose love shapes the world around them. Here, she hopes, the obstacles to hearing your own deepest voice fall away, and life’s music surrounds you.