Regenerative Farming & Grief: The Fog Stayed Here
- Elia Fant
- May 14
- 7 min read
The morning Allen took this photo, we hadn't had rain in weeks.
The fields to the left—baked bare. The pastures to the right—exhausted, dusty, and parched. The whole county was starving for water. You could smell the wildfires from three counties over, the smoke sitting low in the sky like a bruise that wouldn't fade.
But the fog stayed here.
Right over our windrows. Right over the exact ground where we've been building soil for nearly 20 years. The moisture hung thick and heavy in the air like the land was breathing—because it was. The microbial life beneath the surface holds water the way bare sand never can. It creates its own humidity. Its own sanctuary. Its own weather.
While the rest of the world burned and baked, the living soil exhaled.
That exhalation is regeneration. It is the first of the great RE words that anchor my life.
Loss
Breathing is something I find hard these days.
Grief feels like someone took all the oxygen out of the room. Out of the morning. Out of the whole year.
We lost my Mother.
The hardest thing anyone could every type. So hard I can barely respond to text or phone calls. How can I say it out loud? Will penning the words make it more true?
I told you weeks ago that she was declining—that we missed the azalea sale, that the sad seasons were still seasons. I told you I'd be back when I could.
This is me, trying to come back now.
New Mercies Every Morning
The mornings are the hardest.
That's when my brain still runs on the phantom adrenaline of a caregiver. For years, my waking thought was organizing her survival: What time is speech therapy? Are the companion caregivers briefed? Is today a hard day or a quiet day? Our calendars and phones would be a war room of logistics before I'd even finished my first cup of coffee.
Now, the mornings are deafeningly quiet. And I don't know what to do with my hands.
So I clean. I organize. I scrub things that are already clean and straighten ledgers that are already straight. I am desperately trying to bring order into what feels like a shattered room.
And then comes the terrible, heavy guilt of having time.
I find myself standing in the kitchen, realizing I have the whole afternoon ahead of me, and a wave of grief hits me so hard it doubles me over. Because I don't want the time. I would give every single one of these quiet hours back. I would forfeit every peaceful afternoon, every cleared schedule, every finished to-do list, just to have her back. Just to share the same oxygen. Just to hold her hand one more time.
But that is not the season I am in. That door has closed, the threshold has been crossed, and I am left on this side of the veil with empty hands.
So I go outside.
Hands in the dirt
I've been planting things that don't need me to hover over them.
Native perennials along the fence line. Tough, resilient things that know how to survive the heat, survive the drought, and survive a gardener who might forget them for a while.
I get on my knees. I push my hands deep into the dark, cool dirt. My mother used to tell me, over and over: When the world is too heavy, when your attitude needs shifting, go get your hands in the dirt. It isn't just a distraction; it is a physical displacement of pain. You plunge your hands into the earth, and the sheer, grounding mass of it pulls the anxiety right out of your chest.
My dog Frank digs beside me. He thinks he's helping.
And then, the birds come.
My mother tended to the birds for most of her life. She watched for them, fiercely guarded their feeders, and knew exactly which ones were returning residents and which ones were just passing through.
Now, as I sit in the dirt with the hose in my hand, watering the new roots, they land right next to me. Bluebirds. Doves cooing in pairs. And cardinals—the males so blindingly red against the gray dust that it physically hurts to look at them, the females soft, watchful, and still. They hop through the gentle arc of the sprinklers. They drink from the puddles. They do not care that I am sitting in the mud sobbing while I work.
Maybe she sent them to check on me. Maybe they just remember where the safety is. Either way, they linger. And in their lingering, they bring the sacred peace of my mother's garden right to my feet.
Mother's Day was hard.
I spent Mother's Day similar to most of the world, thinking about, meditating on.. My Momma. This was so painful in the shadow of these past few weeks. Fresh in my mind was me staring at a computer screen, building a slideshow for her celebration of life. Photo after photo, tracing the genealogy of her grace. There she was: young and laughing, holding babies, standing triumphant in her yard surrounded by the camellias she collected and the daylilies she knew would always return.
She built a garden that outlived her.
My process this year was completely interrupted. I had a calendar mapped out with absolute precision—courses to launch, a magazine to publish, fields to restore. But the timeline broke.
And I wouldn't change a single second of it. I would throw down the gauntlet and stop the world to take care of her all over again. I would do it a hundred times.
People look at caregiving—at the endless, grueling hours—and they think, What a noble sacrifice. What a detour from her life.
But they miss the holiness of it entirely.
I think of the ancient, sacred story of Mary weeping at the feet of Jesus, washing His feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing them with costly oil. We look at the recipient and think about the honor bestowed upon Him. But the secret of the alabaster jar is that the act of anointing changes the one who pours it.
Washing feet removes the callousness from the caregiver's soul. It strips away your pride. It takes a broken, frightening reality and turns it into an altar.
I never want to know the version of Ellie who didn't sit by her through those final breaths.
She once labored to give me my first breath. She was the very first witness to my existence, the one who held the quiet space as my lungs expanded and my chest rose and fell for the first time in this world. What a breathtaking, sacred symmetry to be allowed to return the honor—to sit beside her, holding her hand, guarding the quiet space as she labored through her final exhales.
I don't want to meet the woman who never learned how to softly stroke a dying mother's forehead while the instrumental hymns played in the dark. That wasn't a detour from my life. It was the absolute ceiling of it. It was holy ground.
The "RE" Words
All the great RE words that I spend so much time waxing poetic about—regeneration, redemption, renewal, restoration, resurrection—they are not clean, sterile theological concepts. They are agricultural. They require the dirt. They require things to fall apart (something I know a whole lot about), to be buried, and to sit in the dark before they can breathe again.
The rain finally broke over our valley of drought a couple of days ago. I stood in front of our large windows and watched it wash the dust off the saw palmetto's and the oak trees. I walked outside just to feel it hit my face and wash over my head.
Tomorrow, I am going out to take soil samples. We still have ground that needs to come back online—land that has been resting quietly while I was caregiving. While I was sitting with her. While I was learning the heavy, holy work of saying goodbye.
Renewal does not care about my business plan. Resurrection does not wait until my attitude is perfectly fixed. It just rises up out of the dark because the Light calls it by name.
I don't know what the next few months look like. I have half-written blog posts, soil that need tending, and a heart that still aches with every breath.
But I have a God who sets my feet on a solid rock. I have a mother's legacy etched into my muscle memory. I have the honor of working my way through holy grief. I have the heavy, wet earth to hold my tears, and birds that sing through the smoke.
And I have you—still lingering, still reading, still walking this road beside me.
The fog stayed here.
Not because it decided to. Not because it tried harder than the fog over the next field. It stayed because of what's beneath — the microscopic life I can't see, holding moisture the bare ground never could.
Somewhere underneath all this grief, there is still so much life waiting to be lived. I can't see it most days. I can't feel it in the quiet mornings when my hands don't know what to do. But it's there — the same way the microbial world is there, exhaling into the fog, doing its work in the dark.
Resurrection doesn't wait for my permission. It rises because the Light calls it by name.
I am known.
And so the fog stays. And so do I.
And then we plant
And so we'll take soil samples. And then we'll plant.
Deep-rooted cover crops — the kind that bust through compaction, break through the hardpan, push down into the dark where nothing has reached in years. They'll make room. Room for water to hold. Room for nutrients to flow. Room for life to return to ground that forgot it was alive.
What the soil needs is what I need.
Something with roots strong enough to break through. Something that makes room for what comes next.
So we're getting back to work. Documenting. Soil sampling. Cover cropping. Finishing the book. Writing our way back through regeneration — one blog post, one windrow, one deep root at a time.
If you want to walk this road with me, join The Common Ground — our newsletter for anyone building a relationship with the land. I'll share what we're learning, what we're planting, and what's rising up out of the dark.
— Ellie
Fant Farm Organics Levy County, Florida
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