I never knew one week could hold so much. A week ago today, I, my wife Beth, and our nine-month-old daughter Cariysa moved into a cabin in the woods on a mountain in rural Maryland. It’s a short walk from a small organic farm with crops, cows, pigs, horses, and a wonderful family that’s going to teach us as much as our heads can hold during this growing season.

There’s all this conflicting personas within me as I sit and try to describe this first week. One guy, a wry humorist, is ready to milk our suburban culture shock for every drop of comic cynicism, regaling you with my bumblings at our taciturn wood stove and the mouse turd I found at the bottom of my cup of tea. (A few days ago, I began a blog in this vein, but I don’t have the heart to finish it. I’ll slap what I began at the end of this blog for the interested.)

Another gentleman, the idealistic homesteader/Chestertonian/apprentice peasant/budding nature lover/loather of cubicles/lover of the real, wants to brim with excitement at our successes and rest with you in awe at the beauty and wonder of the plants and animals that now fill our daily lives.

There’s a strain of piety that sees a connection between our trials and joys and Holy Week and Easter. There’s an embarrassed honesty at the alarming amount of bickering and criticism I’ve leveled at my wife when the stress has escalated. There’s a worker thrilled at the laid-back, human ethic of his new employers, who don’t work as hard in spring as in summer and sometimes read when it rains. There’s even a phlegmatic chap within me that already feels like this is all quite normal and has the vague idea that most of you went out to the spring this morning to get water.

They’re all there. I can’t pick one. It’s all true at once. Just now, the stove is heating beautifully and the open windows are letting in a cool breeze and a bit of the soft rain that’s slaking the silent thirst of the trees, and my mood is gratitude and awe. But it wouldn’t be honest to pretend I always feel that way, or that there aren’t stretches (particularly the first few smoky, stomach-achy, head-splitting, scary alone-in-the-forest nights) that aren’t hell.

Still, though farmer-writers seem to think that most suburbanites idealize farm life, my take is that beneath our veneer of sentiment is a yawning abyss of terror at the supposed discomforts, hardships, drudgery, danger, and downright disgustingness of farm life. As someone still suffering with a severe infection of that terror, I want to thwart that misconceived propaganda every chance I get. So though the wry humorist will make his appearance now and then in these pages, er, screens, I’ll state here and now that hardship is largely in the eye of the beholder. My idea of “hardship” changes more each day.

In fact, I already feel sorry for those few of you out there who must drink water vomited up from the bowels of vast factories that tried to clean it from sewage, eat food shipped tenth-class across oceans and poisioned like Snow White’s apple to fake the long-gone life, shoehorn meaningless physical exertion somewhere between your commutes, jobs, meals, and paperwork that accomplishes nothing except staving off a heart atatck, and try not to think about how you’ll eat, drink, and heat your home if the power plants in Canada slip up again and they can’t fix it fast enough.

I know such absurd insanities afflict only a small minority of you all, but you have my sympathy.

Every time I sit down to write I feel I could write a book just on what’s happened so far, but I want to shut up soon. Here, I’ll just list a few (most of) the “highlights” of what Beth and I have done so far.

• Found a mouse turd at the bottom of a finished cup of tea. (Did I mention that?)
• Killed three mice with peanut-butter-baited traps and felt a strange new pleasure at their cute, dead little bodies.
• Taken hours on several occasions to get a woodstove staretd.
• Filled the cabin with smoke during the above Olympian contests of wits, gone to sleep, and awoken nauseous and with a head about to explode.
• Taken lovely walks through the forest, often in a hurry so as not to be late.
• Learned that being a few minutes “late” is not exactly an issue here.
• Attempted to split a log and barely nicked it.
• Learned how to split wood and had the intense gratification of slamming a huge ax through an actual log.
• Learned how to use a small hatchet to split smaller logs (and hopefully not my thumbs) into kindling.
• Wished heartily that this particular hatchet wasn’t painted blood red.
• Lain awake in a cabin in the middle of the woods on a dark night and cursed a score of stupid horror movies.
• Gathered sicks from the forest floor to use as kindling and felt like I was in a fairy tale.
• Gotten a fire started in the woodstove with roaring (oh, that’s rich) success.
• Told my first bad pun in quite awhile.
• Gathered a basketful of eggs.
• Brushed beautiful horses.
• Shoveled the manure of the beautiful horses.
• Attempted unsuccessfully to stop a runaway colt.
• Found out that was a stupid idea.
• Seeded trays of soil blocks in a greenhouse.
• Transplanted young plants that sprouted in the soil blocks to the earth beneath a hoophouse.
• Actually seen the stars for a change.
• Seen pigs and cows.
• Eaten eggs lain fresh that morning.
• Drunk milk that had spent the previous night inside a cow.
• Eaten salad just picked from the ground.
• Met many kind friends and family of our hosts.
• Attended Easter Mass in a lovely, small church full of nice-looking strangers.
• Found a new shortcut through the woods to our cabin at dusk and arrived with little light to spare (thrilling, but not exactly recommended).
• Seen a man cut down a tree.
• Washed clothes by hand (that would be Beth).
• Nestled into this cabin, swept it, draped it with our stuff, and hung curtains.
• Gotten used to how the dim light of one candle can fill the room.
• Looked at my daughter and wondered what she will think is “normal”, and been happy, happy, happy at the thought.

Anyhow, it’s getting onto one o’clock. Even though it’s still raining, there are eggs to colelct and horses to brush, so that’s it for now. I’m excited to keep sharing this new life with you in future blogs because most of you could probably try all this sometime yourself, and should. You can tell you should if all this talk whets your appetite.

This life is hard sometimes, but I’m glad that meeting my basic needs is hard on me for a change, instead of wage slaves in Mexico, China, Thailand, America, and pretty much everywhere else. Besides, the rigors of this new life are infintesimal compared to the grind of that factory drudgery, and the world of those prisoners is a concrete box and a nightmare of repetition while mine was crafted for me by the hand of God.

All my life I’ve been an unknowing prince, reclining on the backs of a world of slaves. Now I stumble to my own feet. Now I begin to be a man.