Over Hill and Dale

Black Friday, not really my thing.

I hate shopping any time of the year, much less on a day when you can get knifed in a Walmart parking lot over a parking space.

So looking for something as far removed from that madness as possible, I came across the best possible antidote: a farm tour.

Lavender Fields Herb Farm, an organic farm less than thirteen miles from J-Ward, was any easy drive but a world away.

Since it was a walking tour, I'd followed directions to dress accordingly but we began inside the little cafe where the rest of the group, a foursome just finishing up their farm ice cream (whether they were having honey or lavender, I didn't ask) was already waiting for us.

If I hadn't still been so full from my traditional Black Friday turkey and stuffing sandwich, I'd have had some ice cream myself.

Nicole, one of the owners, began the tour with some family history about the house and property with all kinds of show and tell.

Oh, sure, she had an array of arrowheads and a very old shovel used for digging latrines, but she also had old belt buckles (both an officer's and an enlisted man's), old lead bullets and uniform buttons.

We heard about the Richmond Ashland trolley line that ran right in front of their farmhouse, how it took her husband to school and his father to work. The farm's been in her husband's family for something like eight generations.

After explaining how the barn's site had been chosen (high, flat and near water), she got up to lead us on the walking part of the tour.

That's when the ice cream-eating contingent began wavering, with one woman choosing to opt out even after she was informed it was not that far - 2/10 of a mile.

Come on guys, what's a walking tour without walking? The other three said they'd catch up with us.

Nicole and I didn't let their inertia stop us and she led me down a very steep hill toward a bend in the Chickahominy river, running high with the recent rain, talking about how General Lee had crossed near here despite the extreme difficulty of crossing wagons and horses given the vertical topography of the land.

She went on to tell me that we were on the Henrico side and directly across the water was Hanover County, where her two kids sometimes play within sight of their farm.

She showed me 200-year old beech trees including one with its bark eaten off on one side almost to three feet high, but the other side of the tree went vertically down to the river so the beaver hadn't been able to get to that side of the bark.

"That probably saved the tree," she said in her delightful Australian accent.

Curious about how she'd ended up here sounding like that, I asked and got a love story.

She'd been on vacation in New Orleans and so had her now-husband and they'd met on Bourbon Street.

Love, marriage and life in Sydney followed until she told him she'd always wanted to live in the U.S.

Now they're happily ever after raising thousands of organic seedlings and selling them to places like Ellwood Thompson and Whole Foods.

She showed me some of their beehives, from which they make honey, and their newest greenhouse, built by her husband from a kit.

Since he finished building it, he's had extra times on his hands, to the point that the kids finally asked her why Daddy was around so much.

Forget the kids, my first comment was about how great it is to have a partner who can build and fix things, leading to a woman-to-woman chat about how appealing that trait is in a man, at least to the two of us.

We wandered the 37 acres for a good, long while before heading back toward the shop and only then did she look at me and say, "They never caught up with us, did they?"

Nope, they never did but I, for one, was glad they hadn't since I probably wouldn't have gotten all that great girl talk about her husband and her farm life if they had.

"We started with a three to five year plan," she told me laughing. "And now I tell him we're on a 35 year plan with two kids and a farm."

Well, you seem really happy about it all, I told her and she agreed that she's right where she wants to be, loving her life.

I like a woman with an appreciation for how to do Black Friday right.