The Blog
These are stories I lived and questions I still carry: reflections on growing up on a farm, on what it means to leave and return, and on the urgency of preserving land, legacies, and a rural way of life.
Miss Hatcher’s Legacy
In ninth grade, I met a woman who changed the way I saw the world—Miss Betty Joe Hatcher, my no-nonsense biology teacher with dark spectacles, flat shoes, and an unwavering passion for science. She ruled the classroom with quiet authority, but it was outside, in the woods behind our rural school, where her lessons truly came alive.