A still from Sophie Blackall’s book *The Farmhouse*.

Every time I see author-illustrator Sophie Blackall pop up on my social media, I feel a twinge of discomfort. This is a terrible thing to admit. Sophie Blackall is a beloved—perhaps the most beloved—children’s book author and illustrator working today. And she deserves this praise. All of it.

But I am one-part beast and one-part human, so I feel things that are wrong, a lot. This particular feeling towards Ms. Blackall is jealousy, uncanniness, and relief all working together as a wretched army, all making a mess of me.

When I see Sophie Blackall, with her rural snaps of upstate New York, I feel as though she is living the life I always thought I was going to have. Every post reminds me of that old movie Sliding Doors that I loved so much when I was 19 years old, when I was misty about things like doppelgangers and fate.

This feeling I’m describing is presumptuous, to say the least.

It sounds like saying, “I coulda been somebody!” while foolishly forgetting that a) you already is somebody, b) you should be dunked in a bucket of humility soup, and c) you are tone-deaf.

Hear me out.

Blackall lives on a farm in upstate New York where she runs a one-of-a-kind institute for children’s book writers called Milkwood.

I myself grew up on a farm in upstate New York. My entire youth was spent wandering and wondering, for whole days, through minty meadows and clay creek beds. I dreamed, with dog-eared notebooks, of the school I thought I would start someday. I believed with all of my tender heart that I would live on that land and teach. Land and learning would blend into one.

This was so childish of me—where would I get the money (and the money, and the money, and did I mention the money)—but I have always been good at dreaming and bad at realizing.

Sophie Blackall runs a writers' retreat for children's book authors and illustrators in upstate New york. — *Everything at Milkwood is tastefully decorated with antique American farmhouse decor.*

My parents had known, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, that I did not have what it takes to run a farm.

I did not want to shovel manure or fix fences, thank you very much. A farm is much better to look at than to work, don’t you agree. So they sold the property to their nephews and moved on with their lives. They are happy, and they are relieved to no longer be looking after what was once, for them too, a source of dreams—and nightmares.

Moments like this are hard for children’s book writers, or for anyone who spends their life lolling in quixotic heavens.

*Talking to a young friend on the farm where I grew up. This is the kind of “farm work” I could get behind.*

I instantly fell from the sky and hit reality with a dusty thud.

No, life was not a matter of daydreams, I learned. No, life was not a matter of “if you can dream it, you can do it.” No, life was not a matter of wishing upon a traveling star.

(This sounds so ridiculous when I sit here and admit this. I am a fool, a classic fool.)

Anyone with half a mindset for reality would tell me to go get a degree in something useful and fill out the standard forms for Adulthood. They are right. They are very, very right. But I was born to daydream like a child—it is the only thing I have ever known how to do well—and it took me two more decades, dozens of failed “adulthood jobs,” and a cliché dose of mental health flotsam to figure out that I can actually get paid to daydream like a child.

Twenty years after losing my home, I find that my life has become my farm—a place to dig, a place to play, a place to reap a hearty harvest. That sounds terribly corny, but it is true. The seasons have been tough, and they have been right, too. I am, finally and exactly, on the land where I belong. Sophie Blackall can have her farm, I can begrudge it from time to time (because come on), and I can have mine, too.