On her 27th birthday, Ilana Labow sat on a boulder on Kits beach and cried.
Like the waves lapping against the shore, she felt caught up in an eternal push/pull. While she loved the new life she was creating in Vancouver, it meant she was far from her family in Chicago. She wanted to stay; she wanted to go. She wanted to plant new roots in this amazing city; her roots in Chicago had been planted in fertile soil.
“Can you just send me a sign,” she cried out to the universe.
That’s when she heard “clink, clink.” She looked down and saw a bottle – the shards of which she still has – being knocked against the boulder by the oncoming tide.
Her birthday, the Sabbath, a message in a bottle. Obviously, the universe was responding.
“Okay, okay, I’ll take the sign,” she said out loud. Instead of questioning, she’d accept that this is where she was supposed to be.
That night some girlfriends were hosting a birthday party for her and they decided to open the bottle. In it they found a clipping written in Hebrew. Some of the words referenced farming and plants. There was also a note “Love Ishi.” Ishi is “my man” or “my husband” in Hebrew.
Her girlfriends were ecstatic. Maybe it was a sign she was about to meet her man.
A short time later, a young American on a Fullbright Scholarship contacted Labow as part of his research on the viability of urban farms. Marc Schutzbank liked what he heard about Fresh Roots Urban Farm Society, which Labow had cofounded, and offered to volunteer. “He’d take our dreams and put them into spreadsheets,” Labow says.
With his help, they applied for and received first prize in the VanCity Good Money Impact Venture Challenge. That money helped launch Fresh Roots’ initiatives that have transformed lawns into self-sustaining market gardens.
Today, he and Labow are the non-profit’s directors, partners in their quest to put vegetable greens in North America’s greenest city. They’re now also partners in life.
Never ignore a message in a bottle.
My Guide to the Good Life
Ilana’s story is part of a five-part Living the Dream series that will run every week until the launch of our special May 22 Vancouver Craft Beer Week edition, of which VCBW host and Swollen Members frontman Prevail will guest edit.
It also marks the continuation of our month-long contest, My Guide to the Good Life (#myGGL). Urban farming is Ilana’s idea of the Good Life; what’s yours?
Show us, and you could win a trip for two to Portland, an $800 shopping spree, a Squamish Valley Music Festival package and more. Enter here.
