A Farm Wife's Life.

A farm wife's life would be a good life for a writer.

Today we picked up our box of produce from Johnson's Farm, and I spent a couple hours prepping vegetables: washing everything, blanching and freezing chard and green beans (keeping a few out to make a salad with red potatoes, arugula, and green beans in a mustard vinaigrette), scrubbing and paring carrots and beets. We also got asparagus, summer squash, dandelion greens, red potatoes, spring onions, fennel, broccoli, and I think that's it.

If we were completely food self-sufficient (which would not be hard in this climate, if we had the land, the time, and a big freezer), I would be doing this stuff -- gardening, prepping, cooking, putting up -- every day for quite a bit of the year, since the growing season, if you plan it right, runs year round.

So much of writing is thinking, requiring time and some measure of quiet but not the use of my hands. And then there are periods of time when not much is happening in the garden, time for typing and revising, tasks that do require my hands and more focused effort. There would even be time to tend to a couple goats for milk, a few chickens for eggs.