She Planted the Seeds

A Mother's Day Letter from Robin

There is a woman who has never stopped tending things.

Gardens. Family. Friendships that span decades. A faith that holds steady no matter the season. Her children — and her children's children.

That woman is my mom.

And this Mother's Day, I want to take a moment to try and put into words what she has meant to me, to our family, and honestly — to everything that Kinwell Roots is rooted in.

More Than a Mom

My mom is one of those rare people who shows up — not just for her kids, but for everyone in her orbit. She is a devoted wife, a loving sister, a faithful friend, and the kind of woman who keeps in touch with people from every chapter of her life. She remembers birthdays. She sends the card. She makes the call. She shows up.

She is deeply, faithful to God. Not always in a way that announces itself, but in the way she lives — the patience she shows, the grace she extends, the steadiness she carries through hard seasons. Her faith isn't something she wears. It's something she is.

She worked hard. She loved us kids with everything she had. She cared for her own mother tenderly. She has given more of herself than most people ever will — and she did it without making it feel like sacrifice.

I have looked up to her my entire life. I still do.

The Jar Hoarder Who Started it All

If you've read much about Kinwell Roots, you've heard me mention Grandma Kingston — my mom's mother. The woman who saved glass jars, repurposed everything, grew mint along her garage, and lived with a kind of intentional simplicity that we now call sustainability but she just called common sense.

What I don't always say loudly enough is this: my mom was her daughter in every sense of that word.

She carried Grandma Kingston's spirit into our home. The garden was always going. The canning jars were always stacked somewhere. Nothing was wasted. Ingredients were read. Natural options were chosen when they existed. Long before "clean living" was a hashtag, my mom was simply living that way — because her mother had, and it made sense.

I grew up in that. It shaped me in ways I didn't fully understand until I was an adult, turning over a jar of tallow balm and thinking: Oh. This is what I've always believed in. I just didn't have the words for it yet.

She hoards glass jars too, by the way. It's a family condition. We've accepted it. I have deeply embraced it. 

She Planted the Seeds

My love of gardening? Hers first.

My Catholic faith — the roots I return to again and again? She planted that, tended it, and trusted it to take hold.

My belief that family takes care of family, that you show up, that you don't let people you love go without? I learned that by watching her.

The understanding that what comes from the earth can nourish and heal? She lived that before I could articulate it.

Seeds don't always germinate overnight. Some take years. Some take decades. Some are still unfurling in me right now — and I can trace every one of them back to her.

Generations Growing

Here is one of my favorite things about my mom: she didn't just plant seeds in me. She planted them in my daughter, too.

The relationship she shares with Jordan is something I treasure deeply. They have their own closeness, their own language, their own thread of connection that doesn't need me in the middle of it. That is a gift.

And Jordan — who challenged me years ago to read labels, to question ingredients, to pay attention — has now begun her own garden in Florida. She's planting fruit trees. Tending soil. Growing things with her hands in a new place.

That is my grandmother's spirit moving through my mother, through me, through my daughter. Four generations of women who believe in the quiet power of growing things intentionally.

That is not a coincidence.

That is what it looks like when someone plants well.

What She Roots Me To

When I think about the name Kinwell Roots — the kin, the family, the roots that hold us — I think about her.

She is part of what keeps me anchored to this earth. To what matters. To why any of this is worth doing.

Not because she tells me to keep going — though she does.

But because everything she taught me, everything she modeled, every jar she saved and seed she planted and prayer she prayed has become the ground I stand on.

She is one of my (deepest) roots.

And I am so, profoundly grateful.