I am watching the late afternoon sun filter through a crab apple tree. In front of me, a cluster of globe thistles catches the light, their fierce, spiky heads, an impossible purple-blue against the earthy greens of the tree.
To anyone else, these thistles are landscaping. But to me, they are a living promise. When I look at them — as I do nearly every day — the last twelve years vanish, and I am standing once again at the beginning.
Twelve years ago tomorrow, Hailey and I were married. Wanting our celebration to feel entirely like us, we had tucked tiny seeds into the soil of our first garden — watering them, watching them break through the dirt, and grinning like fools when they finally bloomed. They became my favourite wedding flower: a literal piece of the home we were building together, carried in her hands and tucked into my lapel.
When the time came to sell that house, leaving was bittersweet. We were moving on to a daunting dream: building the Hazelnut Inn from the ground up.
It was a massive undertaking — a chaotic season of blueprints and construction dust. But when we packed up our old life, we didn’t leave everything behind. We carefully uprooted our faithful thistle, and brought it with us.
Gardening, like marriage, requires a quiet kind of stubbornness. It’s about anchoring yourselves through shifting seasons and trusting that what you have nurtured in the dark will eventually reach for the light. As we declared twelve years ago:
“I love what I know about you and I trust what I do not yet know.”
Today, that same thistle is growing strong. Its roots have claimed new ground, just as Hailey and I have grown into this life we’ve built together — twelve years of shared mischief and of holding fast to each other through every unexpected turn.
Happy anniversary, Hailey. Twelve years later, our love — just like our thistle — is deeply rooted, wonderfully vibrant, and growing stronger every single day!
