Country living is hard work

The weather in South Jersey was crummy for most of the last week: torrential rain alternating with overcast days so humid I felt as though I were swimming instead of walking. Although I'm glad for the chance to visit family, the climate has meant a period of readjustment.

It was lovely to feel warm sun on my bare legs -- I rarely wear shorts in Seattle -- and to breathe air that wasn't as damp as the laundry I'd just pinned up. The weather was so nice, in fact, that I picked up a bunch of storm-thrown branches and twigs and piled them for kindling.

This week I'll help mow around several fields of Christmas trees (my dad grows them commercially) and tear down the dregs of this year's vegetable garden. I like to do these things. Heck, I didn't even mind hoeing weeds last week.

But that's probably because I don't have to do it all the time. If I did, I wouldn't wax rhapsodic about it.

Don't get me wrong: If I had a little piece of land or even a house with a yard, I'd be gardening and preserving and hanging out laundry. But I'd go into it with my eyes open. Real life is not a Martha Stewart magazine layout.

When you pull weeds or pick vegetables in a South Jersey summer, you're one long, sweaty ache. Canning tomatoes is, despite air conditioning, a hot and stinky job. Blanching, paring and slicing a basket of fruit for processing leaves your hands sore and shriveled.

City or suburban dwellers may daydream about country life: growing vegetables, making jam, watching their kids play on the lawn, raising chickens. The reality is considerably earthier, as it were.

It's mowing twice a week during summer's heat. It's fighting to keep deer, slugs, moles, weeds and those chickens away from your veggies, and getting your arms slashed picking blackberries. It's taking diseased produce or captured insects to the Cooperative Extension Service and saying "What is this?"

Oh, and that laundry you hung out? Plan on rewashing some of it. Birds, you know.

Is it worth it? Sure. It just takes effort. As my dad says, "That's why they call it 'work.' If it were fun they'd call it 'fun.'"

For now, and maybe forever, I'm a city girl. But I have a few daydreams of my own. Everbearing strawberries and dwarf fruit trees. A dozen shades and textures of lettuce. Snap peas so sweet and tender they don't need cooking.

Potatoes in red, blue and purple. Tomato plants sagging under the weight of scarlet fruit. Enough produce to eat all summer long, to share with neighbors and the food bank, and, yes, to can and freeze.

Last Friday night I dreamed about such a place, complete even to a milch goat -- which is weird, because I don't want one. But it doesn't surprise me that I dreamed of a little slice of rural paradise. Nestled in sheets dried in the wind and sun, how could I not?