Rural Free: A Farmwife’s Almanac of Country Living
- Feb 11, 2017
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 6
★★★☆☆
Rachel Peden's Rural Free: A Farmwife's Almanac of Country Living is, like a pot of stew slow simmering on the stove all day, a book that cannot be rushed. Consisting of 12 chapters across 400 pages, I had envisioned completing the book in a not-so-ambitious two weeks thereby giving me time left in the year to tick off another book or two, or to simply enter the holidays unencumbered by literature. But Rachel Peden had other ideas, and so rather than completing the book over a leisurely couple of weeks I instead glacially ambled to the end of it nearly four months later.
Three factors were at play here. First, the book’s month-by-month structure practically demands that the reader keep pace with the actual passage of time. Second, while Ms. Peden’s writings are chronicled by month, there is no other narrative continuity tying each observation—some pages long, others a mere few lines—together. The end result is something I’ll call “anecdote fatigue,” and it often meant that after finishing a chapter I needed a break before I was ready to move on to the next. Finally, there’s the distance from where I am in my life and where Rachel Peden was in hers. I don’t exactly long to live on a rural farm in the 1960s, but I do want to get away and live a much quieter, much simpler, much smaller life. Rather than experiencing the joy of living vicariously through her words, the fact that I’m not yet there made reading Rural Free not quite the pleasure I imagine it one day will be.
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