FARMINGTON — Leslie MacKenzie grew up on a small farm in Colorado, but marriage and her career as a muscular therapist found her settling in Massachusetts. Then she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, and in the process of taking her health back she found that she needed joy to get herself there.

“As I went through being sick, I decided I want to do things that make my soul happy,” she explained, sitting in her kitchen as the fragrance of freshly frosted cinnamon rolls wafted about. “Baking has always been my stress relief, and I love feeding people.

“I was so ill, Lyme disease just knocked me down. And I can’t handle traditional medicine. I went from being a therapist, a body builder, to being barely able to stand.”

Working with her doctor in Massachusetts, MacKenzie tried a series of short-term antibiotics. While she got some relief from her symptoms, the side affects of the medications became too much. She and her husband Greg began researching alternative medicines, and he suggested she try Gerson therapy, a complex juicing regimen used to treat cancer and other autoimmune disorders. From there she began studying herbal remedies. They looked critically at their lifestyle, transitioned to a GMO-free diet, and MacKenzie found herself recovering from her Lyme disease.

During this time, MacKenzie went on a quest to overhaul her life, which included relocating to Maine. And in February, 2018 she found the perfect spot.

“We were looking for rural, agricultural homes. I happened to drive through Farmington on the way to see a property and fell in love. It reminded me of one of my favorite places in Colorado, Loveland,” MacKenzie said. “So I decided to check out places with acreage here. It was winter and I had to walk a deer trail to see the house because the driveway wasn’t plowed. But as soon as I got here, I knew this was it. I called Greg and said, ‘Honey, I found our house. Come see it if you want, but I’m buying it.’”

The house was vacant, sitting on 31 acres. It had been owned by a homesteader who passed away in his nineties. But MacKenzie immediately connected with the way he had cared for the place and the things he left behind.

“I was amazed,” she said. “Hooks to hang things, they were everywhere. There must have been over a 100 keys. He was a tinkerer. I felt like this was already my home, I was possessive of everything I saw. And the location is so wonderful—there is literally one way out of here.”

The couple moved to Farmington that spring; the first order of business was to overhaul the kitchen and obtain proper food licensing for retail baking. This year, they joined the Farmington Farmers’ Market under the name One Way Out Farm, where Leslie sells baguettes, yeast and flavored breads, cookies, scones, coffee cakes and cinnamon rolls. She also has a line of specialty salves that contain ingredients she herself forages.

“Plantain, red clover, jewelweed, yarrow: all these plants have properties that bring relief. Natural, chemical-free relief,” MacKenzie said. “And what I learned about nutrition while dealing with my Lyme disease, I bring that to my baking. I am not gluten free, I do use wheat. But my ingredients are as organic and chemical free as possible. Even the citrus and vanilla extracts I use, I produce myself.”

With her retail baking business taking hold, this spring MacKenzie turned to vegetables. She has a large garden plot filled with heirloom varieties of tomatoes, green and jalapeno peppers, pole beans, garlic and squash. She applies permaculture practices to discourage deer from snacking on her crops.

“They were picking on my sun flowers, so I added deterrents like rosemary, lavendar, marigolds, and of course fencing,” MacKenzie said. “The plants bring in pollinators too, and whatever blossoms that attracts butterflies are not weeded. We sit in our little screen house and watch the butterflies.”

MacKenzie looks around her little farmstead and marvels at how she has changed her life since that scary diagnosis with Lyme disease. She always thought of herself as an extremely strong and stubborn person, until she met Lyme.

“I had to really step back, re–figure out my life and heal my body. My training in physical therapy helped me to connect what I learned about nutrition with physiology and extend it to a whole new business and life.”

Now that she has rehabbed herself, the MacKenzies can focus on rehabbing their farm while letting it tell them how to grow and expand. She looks forward to adding a flock of chickens, but not until the old hen house is redone and that will take time. Another project that excites her will be restoring the root cellar so it can be used for food storage. And then a farm stand to sell all that food out the door.

“I just love this. I feel so blessed to be here and able to do things that make me happy,” she said. “One of the best perks of all this? Every week I test a new recipe. And we get to be the judges. It’s so much fun.”