Blame it on the rain

part one; The Fence Line Series · regeneration & edification

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." —Leo Tolstoy

The overgrown Florida fence line that I was taught to manage turned out to be one of the most biologically diverse native plant communities on our property — and I almost sprayed it.

I want to be honest about that, because the whole point of what I am about to tell you depends on it. The front fence line at 326 — the front of our compost yard, high on the long and overgrown to-do list — had been waiting for the solution I had in mind. The spray bottle. The machete. The special head on the weedeater for the scrub. A crew with their own tools and their own efficiency and the particular satisfaction of a boundary restored.

It waited. And waited.

You cannot spray when it's wet. You know this if you've ever tried — the label tells you, the logic tells you, the results tell you. And in a North Florida summer, it rains every single day. Not all day. Not a dramatic storm that clears and leaves everything dry and cooperative. Just the kind of daily drizzle that comes down for twenty minutes in the afternoon heat and makes the ground damp enough to invalidate your plans without actually watering anything. The moisture doesn't make an appointment. It shows up when it wants to and leaves when it wants to and doesn't care at all about your to-do list.

So the fence line waited.

What That Fence Line Had Already Been Through

I want to be honest about what it had seen before this particular summer. I've had crews out there with machetes. A special head on the weedeater for the scrub. Cleared it clean, more times than I can count, and then maintained that clean with the spray bottle, planning every application around weather windows that Florida's humidity makes genuinely difficult to find.

It always looked right for a while. People would say so. You had it looking so nice. As if a clean line was the measure of something. As if the beautyberry and the sabal palmetto and whatever was choosing to grow there were a failure of maintenance rather than a sign of life so healthy it didn't need us.

The Year the Fog Came In

This past year, my head was foggy in ways I won't fully inventory here. Grief does that. It fills the space where your executive function used to live and makes the simple things — the things you have done a hundred times without thinking — feel like they require more than you have to give. The fence line stayed on the list. The rain kept coming. The days kept going.

I have always noticed more things from the mower than from anywhere else on this farm. Something about the pace of it — slow enough to see, moving enough to keep looking — opens a different kind of attention. My brother and I used to play with roly-polies as kids. You remember those — the little armadillo bugs that curl up in your palm. When did you last see one? When did you last look for one? You grow up and you get busy and the things that don't change your day start to seem unimportant. You stop bending down.

Allen and the Beetle

My husband Allen told me a story recently about walking into Quick King — our local convenience store, which is also a gathering spot, which is also the kind of place where Morriston takes the temperature of itself on any given morning. He walked in and found two customers and the person behind the counter all staring at a giant beetle making its way across the floor. None of them would approach it. What is it? Will it kill you?

Allen walked in behind them, picked it up without hesitating, and carried it outside. It's just a beetle, he said. They're great. Very beneficial. He set it down in the grass and let it go.

Their chins dropped.

I keep thinking about that. Not about the beetle specifically — though I love that Allen Fant will pick up a beetle without a second thought — but about the people staring at it. When's the last time you saw a real beetle? When did we become people who don't know what lives on the floor we walk across every day? What have we dismissed as unimportant because it doesn't change our day? What have we stopped bending down to look at?

We are missing things.

The Drizzle That Changed the Plan

The drizzle came down one afternoon and I was standing at the fence line with my spray bottle and my list and my intention and the rain made me stop.

Just stop.

And in that stopping — which felt like an interruption, like the day being taken from me — I started to see.

Butterflies. Birds moving through the canopy. Further down, a muscadine trail I had been walking past for years — loaded with grapes, wild native muscadine grapes using my fence wire as their trellis without asking permission, which is exactly the right approach. Lizards. More butterflies. The particular quality of light that happens inside a North Florida hammock when the humidity is high and the rain has just passed and everything is suspended between weather systems.

I started to notice things I had been driving past at mower speed my whole life.

And I started to ask — not as a conclusion but as the beginning of something — which of these Florida fence line native plants should stay here, and which should go?

The drizzle was not a delay. It was an invitation.

What I Did When I Stayed

The drizzle came down and I put the spray bottle down and I did something I almost never do.

I stayed.

I walked the entire fence line. Every inch of it. I took ninety photographs — not snapshots, intentional documentation, the kind where you get low to the ground and look at what is actually there rather than what you assumed was there. I identified every plant, every species I could find, cross-referencing UF IFAS identification guides and management recommendations and ecological profiles. I documented every living creature I encountered — every insect, every bird moving through the canopy, every spider, every sign of what was using this corridor that I had been managing from a distance my whole life.

I spent hours out there.

And the longer I stayed, the more I saw.

Butterflies working plants I had written off as weeds. Birds I recognized and birds I didn't. The muscadine trail confirmed — not one plant but a colony of native grapes that have been here longer than the fence. And one thing I almost missed entirely: something attached to a vine that I nearly walked past, nearly photographed without seeing, nearly left unnamed in the inventory.

I will tell you what it was in Part Two.

What I will tell you now is what happened to me in those hours. Not what I found — what happened to me.

Thinking With Intention Before Acting

I thought with great intention about what my next actions might mean. Not just for the fence line as a visual boundary, not just for the to-do list, not just for the way it looks from Highway 326 when people drive past and form their opinions. I thought about what my choices — the spray bottle, the machete, the weedeater with the special scrub head — would mean for every living thing I was documenting.

And that is just the life my eyes can see. There is a whole world beneath the surface of this North Florida fence line that I cannot photograph, cannot inventory, cannot fully know — and it is older than I am and it is working, constantly, without acknowledgment, without applause, without anyone driving past and saying you had it looking so nice.

Selah

There is a Hebrew word that appears throughout the Psalms. Selah. It is an instruction embedded inside the poetry itself — a direction to the reader before they move on. It means: pause here. Meditate on this. Think on these things. Let what you just encountered settle into you before you reach for whatever comes next.

Stop.

Observe.

Record.

Think.

Empathize.

Humble yourself.

The drizzle was my Selah. I did not recognize it as that when it came. I thought it was Florida's humidity being inconvenient one more time, stealing another afternoon from the list.

It was not a delay.

The Invitation

When I finally understood what I was being invited into — the community that had been building itself on that Florida fence line while I was too busy, too certain I knew what needed to be done — I put down the plan I had carried out there with me.

What I picked up instead was something I did not expect to find on an overgrown fence line along a county highway in Levy County, Florida: thirty-three species of native plants and animals doing something extraordinary, inviting me — not asking, inviting — to join the life that was already thriving there.

The fence line does not need me to manage it.

It needs me to be worthy of it.

Tolstoy wrote that the only permanent revolution is a moral one — the regeneration of the inner man. I did not set out to be regenerated by a fence line. I set out to spray it.

I often pray for eyes to see. This is what I found when I used them.

Come back. This is where it starts getting good.

— Ellie Fant · Fant Farm Organics · Levy County, Florida

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Next: Part Two — The Walk. Ninety photographs, thirty-three native species, one extraordinary thing I almost missed, and what the Selah framework revealed about a fence line I thought I knew.

We are Fant Farm Organics, on 100 acres of sixth-generation family land in Levy County, Florida, farmed continuously since 1860. We produce compost and worm castings, document the native biology of our land, and share what we learn here in the Fence Line Series and Common Ground blog. If the land beneath your feet has ever surprised you — we would love to hear about it.

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