After graduating from Warren County High School in 2011, Brittany Weller was off to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she switched majors several times.
“I believe I switched majors four times,” Weller says, shifting between nursing, accounting, and interior design. After a couple years of college, she decided to take a break.
She got a call from an acquaintance out in Covelo, California, who wanted her to work on his farm managing an organic garden. Weller decided to accept the offer, even though she had never been west of the Mississippi River. She opted to travel to California by train so as to see the country, and she remembers her father Mark giving her a ride to the Atlanta Amtrak station.
“My father dropped me off at, I want to say, maybe 3 or 4 a.m. … and there I was with a suitcase and my pillow not really knowing what I was getting into,” Weller says. She enjoyed the train ride, taking in the sights from a viewing car and getting to know her fellow passengers. “I met so many wonderful people that I’m still connected with, just from that one train ride.”
Weller made a go of it in Covelo and ended up taking a liking to agricultural life. “I found my happy place in the garden,” she says.
After the short stint in California, Weller came back to McMinnville in May 2014 to attend her sister Elizabeth’s high school graduation and figure out her next steps. She got on at Amazon and worked there for a spell before deciding to enter the Plant and Soil Science program at MTSU.
At MTSU, Weller found her groove, taking classes in everything from agricultural economics, to greenhouse management, to entomology.
Weller graduated with her bachelor’s degree in August 2016, and she headed back out to California for a second time. In October 2017, Weller moved back to Tennessee to be close to family and be a mother to her newborn daughter, Jasper. “I was just a mom,” Weller says of the subsequent two years. She has split time between California and Tennessee since.
Of her years since high school Weller says they have been spent “definitely living that free-spirit, wandering life.”
Weller was born near Jacksonville, N.C., where her mother, Barbara, was serving as a United States Marine at Camp Lejeune. During her early years she lived in Japan and Hawaii, before her parents completed their service in the Marine Corps and settled the family in McMinnville.
Weller attended West Elementary School and during those years she was quite active. She participated in softball, soccer, basketball, cheerleading, Girl Scouts, karate, and dance, among other activities. “You name it. If it was in McMinnville, I was doing it,” Weller says.
Weller attended middle school and 9th grade at Boyd Christian School, where she played soccer for the Broncos and brought a level of feistiness to the soccer pitch. Weller recalls receiving yellow cards for “kicking other girls’ shins a little too hard.”
For 10th grade she was off to Warren County High School. After becoming entranced by color guard while watching the group practice one day, she joined the team and was a member for the rest of her high school career. At WCHS, Weller also honed her drawing skills in the art classes of Deborah Grepperud and showcased her thespian chops in such school plays as “Alice in Wonderland,” in which she played the Cheshire Cat.
Of her trademark headband Weller says, “It is my go-to for anything and everything. I have work headbands, I have styled headbands. I have whatever I want.”
Whether in California or Tennessee, Weller and Jasper spend a lot of their time in nature. They visit parks aplenty, from the Stone Door to their favorite, the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in California. “As a botanist, everything about a redwood forest is just immaculate,” Weller says.
Weller says when she was in high school she did not anticipate that she would become a mother in her 20s. The experience of being a parent has been transformative for her though. “It grounded me in a way that I never thought possible,” she says, adding, “To have this little person that just loves you unconditionally crawl into your lap and look to you for comfort and security, there’s nothing else like it in the world.”
She reports that Jasper is an excellent travel buddy who at almost 3 years old is already able to hold a conversation and who is capable of doing some scaled-down rock-climbing and exploring.
Weller says her plans for the future are to be a good mother, to travel, and to be open to having new experiences and meeting new people. “Everybody has a story. I don’t care if you’re homeless or Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. Everybody has a story.”
The richness of life comes from meeting people and hearing those stories, she believes.
Weller uses an “Alice in Wonderland” allusion to describe the intrinsic mystery, complexity, and excitement of existence. “It’s kind of just fun to chase the white rabbit and see where life decides to take you,” she says.
