My Happy Place + Giveaway!

My Happy Place + Giveaway!

My husband and I were married a little over a year when he brought me like a pioneer bride out to his family in Wisconsin. I drove deer alongside the hunters; I scaled an eighty-foot silo with him and peered across the acreage that was striped with the remnants of corn.

Though, growing up, my family had Rhode Island Red chickens and floppy-eared rabbits, a fat quarter horse mare and a garden that sustained us through the summer, dairy farming was an entirely different life than I was accustomed.

And I loved it.

I loved the white farmhouse with the black shutters overlooking the garden, the tin-roofed outbuildings and child’s swing. I loved the smell of the barn—a sweet mix of silage and hay and milk. I loved the striped cats that wove around my ankles as I scratched the heifers’ knobby heads.

I could see why my husband started coming out to visit his uncle’s family when he was sixteen. There was a peace found in the lush driftless region—blue sky, white clouds, red barns, and a green scrollwork of land—that sometimes evaded us back home.

A hymn sung before supper: “We thank thee Lord for this our food.” Steaming bowls passed down three lengths of table covered with mismatched cloths. The children effortlessly woven into the thick tapestry of adults. For dessert, cakes and pies—apple crumble, rhubarb, pecan, and chocolate cake with peanut butter icing—and coffee and homemade whipped cream.

Picking weeds in the garden, the soil sifting like cocoa between our fingers and our conversation falling just as easily from our lips. Hills stippled with rows upon rows of apple trees. Valleys swathed in a low-hanging fog leftover from warm, afternoon rain.

Wisconsin, for many years, has been the place that my husband looked forward to visiting each season where the stress of day-to-day sloughed away like shed skin. And I must say that this past week, Wisconsin has become my happy place, too.

Do you have a “happy place” that you like to visit? If so, what is it about the area that makes it so special to you?

In honor of my sophomore novel, The Midwife’s launch, my publisher is hosting a fun giveaway:

Let’s be honest . . . a caffeine boost never hurts. For author Jolina Petersheim, it’s especially helpful to have her favorite drink on hand when she’s racing toward a manuscript deadline. In celebration of the release of her sophomore novel, The Midwife, we’d love to enable your caffeine addiction and give you a taste of Jolina’s beautiful prose. For a chance at a $25 Starbucks gift card and your choice of Jolina’s novels (either The Outcast or The Midwife), enter through the Rafflecopter widget below.

To hear from Jolina on her go-to caffeine boost, stop by www.crazy4fiction.com.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Image source