People seem interested in the rural lifestyle we’ve chosen, so I thought I’d give a glimpse of what it’s like.

Like most people, we lived and worked in the city after we got married.  But we always longed for space, and had a deep desire to raise our (future) children in the country.

We took a gamble – actually, we leaped off the damned cliff – a couple of years into our marriage by moving out of the city into a shack (no exaggeration) on four acres in southwest Oregon. No jobs, you understand.  We just – moved.

I went to graduate school and worked part-time.  My husband desperately tried to get a woodcraft business off the ground.  For the next ten years, through the arrival of our two daughters, we scratched for a living.  Our income was sporadic and unbelievably tight.

Why did we stick to the woodworking business when it was paying so little?

It was because we recognized that a home business was the ticket to a rural lifestyle.  Our place in Oregon was close enough to a city that we could have a found a job and commuted.  But that meant we would always be tied to a city.  We wanted the freedom to be able to move anywhere, as far away as we wished from the urban lights, without having to worry about commuting to a job.

So we stuck with the woodworking business even during the times that we were close to failing.

Meanwhile, we practiced homesteading on our four acres.  We got a cow and calf and I learned how to milk.  We got chickens and I learned how to butcher them (still not my favorite thing to do, but I can do it).  We planted a huge garden and I learned to can fruits and vegetables.  We line-dried our clothes. 

We looked for property for two years in Oregon but were unable to find anything within our price range and property requirements.  Since we now had the freedom to live anywhere, we started looking all over the Pacific Northwest.

In 2003 we found forty acres in north Idaho within our price range.

We’ve planted a berry patch (and promptly engaged in an endless battle against weeds – thank God for black plastic).  We have no garden yet, though we finally have an area fenced off.

We also have seventeen chickens and a rooster, two horses, six cows/calves, and a bull.  The cattle are a type called Dexters, which are a small Irish breed suitable for milk and meat.  I milk two cows every morning, and we put our surplus steers in the freezer once a year.  I make yogurt and mozzarella cheese from the extra milk.

Both my husband and I have master’s degrees in the sciences (geology and biology respectively), and a lively interest in history, art, music, and writing, so we’re doing our best to pass these interests on to our daughters.

We’re crazy over books and we own over three thousand of them on subjects ranging from astronomy to zoology.  There are books in every room of the house (including the bathrooms) with the possible exception of the kitchen, unless you count the cookbooks.

What is a typical day like for me?

Well, I’m a morning person.  Try to keep me up past ten o’clock at night and I droop and fade…but come 4 a.m. I’m ready to bound out of bed.

Since my husband and I live and work together 24/7, we’ve found it’s essential to have private time.  My husband is more of a night owl, so his private time is after everyone has gone to bed.  I’m an early bird, so I get up before anyone else.  Works beautifully.

I have to mention the wonderful office nook that my husband built me.  We have oversized ceilings in a portion of our house, and he made my office half-way up a flight of stairs.  It’s tiny (six by eight feet), but it’s mine. 

Then I write.  When I’m hot on a story I’ll set myself a goal of two thousand words (about eight double-spaced pages).  With intense concentration, I can write that in about two hours, after which I’m drained.

But I’m not always that intense.  If I’m not under deadline, I’ll usually write only a thousand words a day.  Sometimes I work on cleaning up some previous writing.  Other times I do revisions.  Sometimes I have a new story I’m developing, in which case I’ll work on the outline or synopsis.

But whatever it is I’m doing, I write every single day, Saturdays and Sundays included.

Yes, this sounds all very committed, but I must admit that I also look for every possible excuse to procrastinate.

Almost every writer does.  That’s because writing is hard work.  Every writer (with the possible exception of Nora Roberts…maybe) is filled with self-doubt about the quality of her writing.  For some, this self-doubt is so strong that it prevents a person from ever submitting what they’ve written, or even from writing anything at all.

I have a little more confidence, but that self-doubt still applies.  So I procrastonate. I’ll troll the internet, or endlessly check emails, or divert myself with fine-tuning something that’s already fine-tuned…or anything other than just gritting my teeth and writing, dammit.

It takes effort to actually open up the current story I’m working on and write new stuff.  Yet the funny thing is that once I get into it, the time flies.  I’m involved and hate to be interrupted.

But I have to interrupt myself to do the barn chores every morning, whether I like it or not.  I might be in the teeth of my story, but when the cows start bellowing I know I have to take care of them.  A full udder cannot possibly be comfortable.

Depending on the time of year, I milk the cows anywhere from 5 a.m. (in June) to 7:30 a.m. (in December). 

The girls usually get up around 8 a.m., the day starts, and then my writing time is shot.  Instead I relax, forage for breakfast, make coffee for my husband…the usual morning stuff.

Sometime between 10 a.m. and noon, the girls and I settle down to schoolwork.  We don’t follow a set curriculum (pre-purchased curricula are too expensive for us).  Our usual topics are math, science, history, geography, and English (which could be grammar, writing, spelling, etc.).  I gave up teaching reading years ago.  Once each kid achieved her “reading breakthrough” around the age of six, I found it was useless to try to anchor them down with anything formal.  Each kid reads about four grade levels above her age anyway.

Formal schoolwork seldom takes more than two hours a day, and is often interrupted by lunch.  After this I do housework or work on a production run for our woodcraft business (many steps of which can actually be done in the house rather than the shop).  I plan out dinner.  I might run into town (four miles away) for errands.  The girls either play with friends during this time, or work on something around the house. 

Unless we are on a time crunch with our home business, or unless the girls are sick, we don’t permit them to watch movies until evening (if they bother watching anything at all).

We usually have dinner as a family.  After dinner, while I do dishes, the girls do their household chores and my husband catches up on some computer work - unless we are on deadline for our business, in which case he heads back to the shop.  We do barn chores and shoo the cows into the corral for the night.

Then the girls can watch a movie or play, while I read a book or work on our business.  I seldom have a chance to write during the day.

I do, however, have a marvelous little device called an AlphaSmart, which is a portable keyboard.  When the girls have their music lessons, I take it with me and write during their lessons.  Anywhere I know I’ll be stuck for awhile, I make sure I have the AlphaSmart with me so I can get some writing done.

If I’m hot on a project, I’ll even keep the AlphaSmart in the kitchen and dash off a paragraph or two while cooking dinner, something the girls find endlessly amusing.

As you can see, there is nothing really remarkable about our life.  It’s pretty relaxed.  We are homebodies.  Much of my writing deals with rural themes. Country living continues to fascinate me, even when I’m crouched next to a cow milking in zero degree weather.