Since penning the first part of this blog post, we have experienced one of our snowiest and cold filled winters in quite some time. The view was one of white for weeks on end… a beautiful sight to behold. Now that the cold is losing its grip in its slow slide into spring, it is almost like the inner workings of my heart and brain have been dictated by this view as well as my body. Locked in by ice coated surfaces, it was hard to navigate back and forth to the barn with the new knee, so from my upstairs office, I plotted, planned and penned for the year ahead. My mind, still battling, almost frozen itself like the scenes out my window, is slowly thawing. I can see the light moving back in. Have you ever encountered moments in life where the war you wage within yourself is volatile? Where your self talk is conflicting and cannot agree with itself, moving back and forth with decisions within the issues at hand?

We talk about the authenticity of objects and life here at Life’s Patina, all touched somehow by their past and hopeful emergence into the present. We try to live within the present, the present seasons, the present situations, the present state of our lives, and this is a relevant part of it. Just like the seasons change, so do our hearts, our goals and our purpose. I started Life’s Patina 15 years ago, when our oldest son was 20 and our youngest was 10, with their three other siblings in between. It was born from an idea, as I had been looking at mini farms to move to for the five years prior, not only to create a safe space for our oldest son, a born nature lover who, due to how he was wired and his learning differences, was experiencing life differently than most his age, but also to get him closer to the school he attended for his special needs. You can read more about my journey to starting Life’s Patina here. 

The reason I am going back to the origins of the WHY behind why I started Life’s Patina is to dive deep into the WHY behind the direction I will be taking with this Labor of Love and this true passion of mine.

Close friends of mine, my husband and my children know that I eat, sleep and breathe what I do. What I do is entwined in some core beliefs of mine and my life, thus core beliefs of what we try to do here at Life’s Patina, as I do not separate the two, and this is something that will never change:

• History should be valued, respected, and understood in the context of the time period of which it happened. Its buildings should also be held in the same regard, and instead of being knocked down for the latest and greatest, either renovated to continue to house the people of future generations or reinvented to house adaptive reuse projects. Meaning how can you adapt them to be “reused” in another manner from which they came?
• The Value of our story is incredible and powerful!  Each and every one of ours. Understanding one’s story helps us to understand each other… and we all know that we need more of that in our world today. We believe in human connection and interaction and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.
• Giving yourself and each other the grace card. I have written about this before and believe firmly in this. There is no perfection in this world. There might be people who have an eye for detail, a drive to do the best they can, and an innate sense of pride when they accomplish the goals they set out to do, but that is not perfection. And beauty is in imperfection. (that is fodder for another blog post)
• Our natural environment in which we live should be protected, because along with life, it is our greatest gift. We do the best that we can with turning other’s trash into treasure, repurposing and offering goods that can be reused. And when we don’t, we take every step possible to do our best to turn the trash that comes with the new items we offer into other items as well… true recycling. We save everything…in the hopes that it doesn’t end up in a trash dump.

20/40/60/80

I am also a true believer in signs that are given to us, our eyes just have to be open to them. Strange coincidences, reasons we move forward or act in a certain way based on beautiful little signs… some call them God winks… an event seemingly coincidental, but coming from a divine intervention. You can read here about some of the signs and reasons I felt that the crumbling Jenny Lind house in Historic Yellow Springs was to be the site for our extension of Life’s Patina, the home of our Mercantile and Cafe.

Some of these present God winks came together in the year between one knee replacement and the other. Those winks, combined with my tired body, an overwhelmingly well-attended Holiday Barn Sale, the continuous pull of making our Mercantile and Cafe all that I intended it to be, the life changes that some of my closest friends and staff are experiencing and time… yes… time… made it clear that changes were much needed.

Let me explain the symbolism of the 20/40/60/80 year. This year, in 2026, we will celebrate:

• 20 years of being the stewards of Willowbrook Farm. 20 years since we moved our family into a home that was much more than we ever had hoped or dreamed of. Where our minds ran wild of how we could continue to impact the story within its walls while helping to keep the walls standing. Where we built a home and gathered friends and family to celebrate in it. Where we worked together to build its reinvention from a dairy farm to a farm where we could invite and greet people here, both in their own celebrations and in their love of feeling and experiencing this property. We wanted to share it with others.
• the 40th Wedding Anniversary of marriage to my husband. 40 years of building our love, our family… our story together. A story not unlike others, filled with all of the gifts, emotions, blessings, challenges, hardships, laughter and tears. A journey that neither one of us would turn back on but are forging the next 60 together… or whatever time we are given! A journey which I could write a book on, as could many of us who have been together for this amount of time might as well, from the vast amount of content that they have lived through together.
• My 60th birthday. A number whose significance is not lost on me. I vividly remember talking to my dad when he turned 60 and when asked how he felt, he replied somewhere along the lines of not feeling 60 and not feeling 50 for that matter. His mind was as sharp as ever and he was still taking on our boys in competitive basketball games and could hit a golf ball a mile. Take this from a man whose ideas on aging were shaped by his mother, my grandmother, who would tell a fib about her age each and every time when recanting a story. When checking her into the hospital after she fell down our stairs sometime in her 90’s, we took out her license for her and her actual birth date was a couple years later than what she’d told us! Very important note, aside from an egg on her head she was fine after the fall and lived until 100 years old. We have heard the phrase that 60 is the new 50, 50 is the 40, 40 is the new 30 and so on and so on. There is a definite shift in mindset on aging but there is a reality about it and there is still so much to do and experience in this big, beautiful, wide world of ours.
• My mom’s 80th birthday. She was 20 when she birthed me so it’s been very easy along the way to remember her age… if I could remember mine for I am a product of my own upbringing. It has been a gift and a blessing to have my parents with us on this Earth, along our journey, as well as our extended families. Our own family is getting older, launching out on their independence in various areas of the country and the world and we want to spend time with them. We often take these things for granted…that these people will be in our lives forever, that this life will go on forever, but as we all know, that is not the reality.

In these moments of deep reflection, one thing stands out and that is the passage of time and how quickly it occurs. All of the above events seem unreal. It seems as if we just moved into this house, yet the real life occurrences while we have lived here for 20 years couldn’t possibly fit into “just yesterday.” No, it wasn’t just yesterday, it was two decades ago. Decades that were filled with the beauty and hardships of raising a large family and building a dream business. A business where we create experiences. Yes, we sell things as well, but we sell them in an environment that we want to inspire our guests in, each and every time. Where we listen to the stories of others that enrich our own lives. Where we create and design and present everything we sell, in ways that are unique. Where we strive to create an atmosphere where people feel at peace and can enter, take a deep breath and possibly forget the worries and negative thoughts that might have filled their trip to get to us.

Given all of the above, allow me to answer the question you all have been asking… “When is the Spring Barn Sale?”

We will be taking a step back from Barn Sales as we know them. Our Barn Sales will look different this year, beginning this spring.

Before I go further, we are NOT closing down Life’s Patina…we are enriching and improving how you interact with it.

Introducing our Barn Edit Event – Foundations & Heirloom Pieces. These events will be a scaled down, stripped back version of our previous Barn Sales. We are getting back to our roots when we first opened with highlighting our vintage, reclaimed and salvage items. We also want you to have the type of experience when you get here that feeds the soul. Not one that is elbow to elbow with parking a hot commodity, vying to get in line and then standing in line for an hour or more to check out. While those barn sale experiences are good for our numbers on paper, they are not good for our customers. Over the years, we have ordered more and more new items and purchased more and more vintage so that everyone who walks into our doors can find something they are looking for. And we still want to fill that need, but the deeply layered look and mass amounts of merchandise will not be our focus… the foundational pieces will be. These events will require free, timed entry reservations and will not include any additional vendors. We will announce dates for these events and a link to make your timed-entry reservation tomorrow, April 1.

This year, your experience with Life’s Patina will be a little more personal, a little more intimate. We are parring things down to not only improve your experience with us but to show you how we create what we do. In paring down our Barn Sales, this allows for time to be spent creating smaller scale experiences where you can interact with us and this beautiful farm and property that we so want to share with others. As noted above, time is a hot commodity and if I only had a full 24 hours in a day to bring to fruition all of the ideas that spin around in this head of mine… but I don’t. For so long now, I have short changed those ideas and my heart. We have some fabulous content and experiences planned for the remainder of this year which will open you up to how we do what we do. It will open up areas of this farm that you haven’t seen both virtually and in person. Hopefully it will open up time for me to write, to develop the garden again so that we can feed our customers at the cafe with what we grow here. The bottom line is that

I love this farm, I love this property, I love the Jenny Lind House where our Mercantile and Cafe is located, I love my family and I love this little business I have built over the years. I need more time to love them ALL in a way that respects that time. 

We also have some very exciting things happening at the Mercantile and Cafe that we will be launching this year which we will announcing soon. Think a writing and reading room (all analog), seasonally designed gift boxes that highlight Life’s Patina’s favorites, catering, events, hopefully opening up the second and third floors…and more.

Most of all, this is two fold. When giving thanks… I could not have built the foundation for what we have done without my small but mighty team. Some part time, two full time, that have surrounded me with their belief that we could do this and their labor to support it. Things are changing in that regard as well, as life never stays stagnant.

And to YOU, all of our followers and customers, who also believe in what we do, who know that our business runs deep and words matter, both yours and mine. Who know and recognize all that we are trying to do and who support that mission…I could not have done this past decade and a half without you. I fervently look forward to doing the next decade and a half with you in whatever form and shape it takes!

I want to leave you with this little story. When I published the blog preceding this one, whose subject matter was my bedroom and the window and view I took in on a regular basis during my healing time, I received a beautiful comment. A comment that cemented my die hard truth in my heart that what we have done here is relevant and that every story has meaning. The comment was from a woman who was raised at Willowbrook Farm many many years ago, whose mother, she said, had her own “Prie-Dieu” at the very window from which I was observing the landscape below. She said it was where her mother spent her quiet times with God. The impact that her comment had on me brought me to tears, as she then wished that I experienced as much solace and healing as her mother did from that window. My little story in the form of a blog post brought on the sharing of her little story about her mom, thus giving me a small snippet into not only a window on the history of this house but a window into a past inhabitant’s life in this house. We have heard from countless people who once called our home their home and the stories that we have been told along the way are priceless, confirming the validity in sharing them as they are powerful in so many ways. Connection, relevance, understanding, appreciation and sometimes the why behind a generation. That subject matter is for a later day but in this moment in time… share a story, listen to someone else’s story… for you just might have a greater appreciation and understanding after doing so.