Hi! It’s me.

I’ve been telling you bits and pieces about Harp Weaver for a while now, but I don’t think I’ve ever really told you where it came from.

After my Momma died, I needed somewhere beautiful for my mind to go.

What began as a distraction slowly became research, and then an idea, and now—apparently—a thing I’m actually trying to build.

And this week, I finally started documenting it.

Rabbit Holes and Other Lewis Carroll–Flavored Activities

An essay by Lannie, finally narrated by Lannie

My mother died, and I needed something beautiful to think about.

That is the whole origin story.

Very strategic.

Very MBA.

No whiteboard. No market research. No “addressable market.”

Just grief and Pinterest.

Which, if we’re being honest, has launched worse businesses.

After my Mama died, my brain became a fairly unreliable neighborhood.

I had spent the last two years caring for her, which meant my days had structure whether I liked it or not.

Medication. Meals. Laundry. Hospice nurse visits. Bed linens. Keeping her safe. Trying to make her laugh.

Trying not to lose her before I lost her.

And then she died.

And suddenly there was all this empty space where she had been.

That is one of the strange things nobody adequately explains about caregiving.

You think grief will feel like sadness.

And obviously, yes.

But it also feels like somebody has removed a load-bearing wall from your life and then left you standing there holding a pill organizer.

So I needed somewhere else for my mind to go.

Somewhere beautiful.

And then I saw something.

I can’t even remember exactly what it was now, which is unfortunate considering this thing may eventually cost me several hundred thousand dollars.

I think it was a video.

There was a chef-type person.

There was some gorgeous property with a French name.

Maison de Something.

That’s all I had.

Astonishing archival work, Lannie.

Anyway, there were gardens and food and old buildings and land and people staying there.

And the thing that got me was that it didn’t seem like a hotel.

It seemed like somebody had made a world.

Then opened the gate.

Well.

That was it.

Down I went.

Farms led to farm stays.

Farm stays led to little inns.

Then regenerative agriculture.

Garden hotels.

Cottages.

Outdoor dinners.

Orchards.

Then women carrying baskets through fields at sunrise, because apparently the internet decided I was emotionally available for linen aprons.

And I was.

Completely.

At first, it was just somewhere to put my head.

My mother was dead.

Everything hurt.

So I thought about flowers.

That seemed safer.

Flowers led to gardens.

Gardens led to land.

Land led to Zillow.

Then Realtor.com.

Then Land.com.

Those led to calculations.

Calculations led to septic systems.

And that is how grief becomes a foundation.

Somewhere along the way, I gave the imaginary place a name.

Harp Weaver.

From Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.

A poem about love and maternal sacrifice.

Because apparently I can’t even have an imaginary hotel without dragging my Mama into it.

I called one cottage Ollie Jo.

After her.

There would be flowers people could cut.

An orchard.

A greenhouse kitchen.

Dinners under the trees.

String lights.

Movies after supper.

A few cottages tucked into the landscape.

Massage and cedar baths, because if you’ve spent nine hours at Round Top Antiques Week carrying an iron garden urn because somebody told you it was French, you have earned the right to be submerged in hot water.

There would be writers.

Artists.

Garden people.

Floral classes.

Slow mornings.

Good food.

Beautiful rooms.

Conversations that wandered somewhere interesting.

And absolutely no one making you participate in anything you didn’t want to participate in.

At this point I assumed I was inventing an extremely specific fantasy.

Then I started researching.

And that was irritating.

Because other people had already thought of it.

Or something suspiciously similar.

Last year, exactly one month after my Mama died, Vogue published an article about regenerative farming becoming a wellness travel trend.

I did not see it then.

I was busy figuring out what to do with her clothes and occasionally standing in rooms without remembering why I had gone into them.

But a year later I found it.

And it was describing something called farm hospitality.

Not a farm with a guest room.

Not a hotel that has placed one extremely clean goat near reception.

Actual hospitality built around the life of the land.

Food.

Gardens.

Architecture.

Agriculture.

Wellness.

Stewardship.

Quiet.

And I thought:

Yes please. That.

Because we keep describing luxury as though it must involve Carrara marble.

But some of the rarest things in modern life are almost free.

A long afternoon.

Darkness.

Birdsong.

A tomato that tastes vaguely interested in being a tomato.

Dinner outside.

Someone making you coffee.

A chair under a tree.

Nothing pinging.

Nobody needing an answer.

No appointment until supper.

That is starting to look fairly luxurious to me. 

Then I started looking for the women.

Because the men are very easy to find.

YouTube is absolutely crawling with men who have purchased fourteen acres, three black shipping containers, a Kubota, and suddenly developed very strong opinions about passive income.

They will teach you how to pour a slab.

They will teach you ADR.

They will teach you how to build an Airbnb for $47,000 using reclaimed missile silos.

Then they’ll stand in front of it and tell you they cleared $632,000 in the first quarter.

There is occasionally a helicopter.

I do not understand the helicopter.

The suggestion, however, kind of makes me want to knock the smug right out of them.

But where were the women?

Turns out they were there.

They just weren’t standing in front of cabins yelling about cash flow.

And once I found them, the whole thing got bigger and stranger and more specific.

Gardens.

Guest rooms.

Dinners.

Orchards.

Old houses.

Regenerative agriculture.

Hospitality as a way of making people feel held.

I found women building places where land, food, beauty, business and hospitality were allowed to belong together.

Brenda Smola-Foti built The Ground in Oregon around land, farming, lodging, food, wellness and education.

Amalia Graziani took eighty-eight acres in the Hudson Valley and made working land beautiful without making it decorative.

Keva Niver built Boheme Retreats with restored vintage campers on leased land.

That one annoyed me.

Because I had been telling myself Harp Weaver begins when I buy Harp Weaver.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps it begins with a dinner.

Or a film.

Or a garden class.

Maybe the place is not the first thing.

Maybe the idea is.

Scottie Jones showed me that hospitality can help economically support a farm.

Which made me realize I had been asking all the wrong questions.

Will the flowers make enough money?

Will the orchard make enough money?

Will a kitchen garden make enough money?

Maybe the carrots don’t have to pay the mortgage.

Thank God.

Imagine the pressure.

Maybe the carrots make the dinner better.

The flowers make the stay better.

The orchard makes the morning walk better.

The land increases the value of the hospitality.

The hospitality pays for the land.

Well.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

And then I realized something else.

The men online had mostly been teaching me how to build structures.

The women were teaching me how to build places.

Those are not the same thing.

And I need both.

I absolutely need a person on YouTube to tell me how much amperage a cottage requires.

But I also need the woman who can show me how a guest becomes attached to an orchard.

Different departments.

Then there is Isaac French, who built Live Oak Lake in Waco.

I started following him because I thought he could teach me how to build the physical thing.

Which he can.

But what has interested me lately is that his newsletter isn’t called How to Maximize Revenue Per Available Cabin.

It’s called Field Notes.

And his central idea is building beautiful places that matter.

Places.

That word has room in it.

A hotel is a thing.

A place is a relationship.

His properties became stories.

The stories became an audience.

The audience led to education and other projects.

And I looked at what I’d been doing and thought:

Well, hell.

I’ve already started.

I have been waiting for permission from the deed.

But the story doesn’t need the deed.

I can document the land search.

Study the women.

Study Round Top.

Learn about soil and gardens and hospitality.

Learn what not to buy.

Possibly several times.

I can film the mistakes.

Write about the questions.

And by the time Harp Weaver exists physically, perhaps it will already exist in people’s minds.

That is a very different way to build.

And what I want is not actually that complicated.

It’s just large.

I want a piece of land.

I want to make it healthier.

I want more birds and bees there ten years later than there were when I arrived.

More shade.

Better soil.

More things flowering.

I want a few beautiful cottages.

Not thirty-two.

I do not want to know what thirty-two toilets do at the same time.

I want gardens.

A greenhouse kitchen.

An orchard.

A table under trees.

I want somebody who has spent all day shopping antiques to come back exhausted, dirty and slightly financially ashamed and have somebody hand her something cold to drink.

I want people to learn things there.

Make things there.

Eat very well there.

Sleep deeply there.

And maybe remember some part of themselves that modern life has been talking over.

I want women to come there and meet the women who made places before us.

Gertrude Jekyll.

Beatrix Farrand.

And all these living women I am finding now.

Women who bought land.

Women who leased it.

Women who inherited it.

Women who had absolutely no idea what they were doing until they did.

That last category feels promising.

And yes, it has to make money.

Beauty that bankrupts you is not regenerative.

That is merely an expensive nervous breakdown with hydrangeas.

So I want the cottages to help pay for the gardens.

The gardens to make the cottages more valuable.

The classes to help support the grounds.

The dinners to support the kitchen.

Each part strengthening the others.

Not a pile of unrelated ideas.

An ecosystem.

Which brings me back to my mother.

I wish I could sit down and tell her all of this.

I would explain regenerative agriculture.

Farm hospitality.

Guest journeys.

Proof of concept.

Adaptive reuse.

And I would probably be halfway through some extraordinarily clever cottage financing strategy when she would look at me the way she always did and say:

“How did you get so smart?”

She used to say that to me.

And every single time I gave her the same answer.

“From you, Mama. I learned from you.”

And I would say it again now.

Because she taught me hospitality long before I knew it was a business.

She taught me to feed people.

To notice people.

To make things beautiful.

To make room.

To use what you have.

To keep going.

To make a home feel like somewhere somebody belongs.

To say:

“Come in this house.”

Perhaps this whole thing is less of a departure than I thought.

Perhaps I am simply taking what she taught me and putting acreage around it.

That is a fairly good inheritance.

I went looking for something beautiful because I missed her.

I thought I was distracting myself.

Instead I started building a life.

Not yet with lumber.

Not yet with land.

Mostly with research and hope and an alarming number of browser tabs.

But still.

Somewhere in Central Texas there is probably a piece of ground going about its business completely unaware that I am looking for it.

It does not know about Ollie Jo.

It does not know there will be flowers.

It does not know my mother’s name.

It does not know I have already mentally moved several buildings around on it.

Frankly, neither does my realtor.

But I am learning.

I am looking.

I am gathering the pieces.

And if my mother were here, she’d probably ask me how I got so smart.

From you, Mama.

I learned from you.

The land isn’t mine yet.

The story has already begun.

A little postscript

That last line has become something of a promise to myself.

I’ve started a new YouTube series called Finding Harp Weaver on my Curated Chaos Collective channel, where I’m documenting this from the beginning—not from the beautiful finished place someday, but from right here:

looking for land, learning what I don’t know, studying the women and places that came before me, making mistakes, changing my mind, and trying to figure out whether I can actually build the thing I see in my head.

Episode One is up now.

If you’d like to come along while I find out, I’d love to have you there.

Love, Lannie♡