On my nightstand....

My bedside book collection clearly reveals where my head is these days: wrapped-up with colorful visions of our upcoming summer farm-stay family vacation on a working farm in Vermont.  Inspiring my visions is a host of books that I have read, am reading, or am about to read on food, farming, homesteading, and living a more deliberate, self-sustaining life that is deeply connected to food, family, and nature's rhythms.

I am currently in the middle of The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball.  I absolutely love this book, which tells the true-life tale of a New York City journalist who falls in love with a smart and dedicated farmer and begins a homesteading life on a rural New York organic farm.  The book exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly of farming life with exceptional detail and wit. Love it.

What is it about country farm life that is so appealing, so beckoning?  Is it that it is the antithesis to the hurried and cramped city life?  Or is it more?  Is it more about a refueled desire among many Americans to shift our priorities from the fast and factory-produced to the traditional and time-honored?

I look forward to exploring these questions further during our July farm-stay vacation, where we will be actively involved with milking the cows, collecting the eggs, making the cheese, watching the goats being born, seeing the hay being made, and a countless array of other farm activities, while also exploring the unparalleled beauty of Vermont's countryside.

To help get a more candid picture of life on the farm, specifically for homeschooling farming families, I am putting together a wonderful series of guest-blogs during our vacation from real-life families who homeschool and homestead on family farms, some of whom left the city life behind to do so.

Hmmm.....

As Kimball writes in The Dirty Life: "I'd mistaken fascination for love a few times in the past, but this was the first time I'd got it wrong the other way around."