A Fresh Start

In honor of the first day of spring, I am starting fresh with this blogging thing. I really love blogging. The problem is, I spend so much time loving other people's blogging that I forget to leave time for my own. So, in keeping with the optimism that spring always lures me into, I decided to recommit.

I first became a country mouse when I was 9 and my family (my parents, me, and our yellow lab) moved into a log house in the woods. Coming from suburbia, the rural life was something of a culture shock. Years of raising chickens and goats--complete with heading out to the barn for milking chores before school each morning--farmerized me just enough to be a country girl to the urbanites I was around at college, but was never enough to completely chase the city girl core out of me. For a long time, I tried hard to purge the country mouse out of my system, but it was no use. I'd like to say I claim dual citizenship, but now, over 16 years after moving my own family into my childhood home, I realize it's time to embrace my inner country mousiness.

I was going to include a list of the top five things I love about the rural life, but they all were pretty much variations on the same theme--epitomized by the fact that my children can relieve themselves outdoors (a practice I STRONGLY discourage, and one of the reasons I wanted girls, but that's another story) without being photographed by the neighbors. But most of the time we put all that privacy to much more respectable uses.