Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Two


A Brief History of How I Ruined My Own Life





Like all fourteen-year-olds, I used to be a nine-year-old. In retrospect, I was an annoyingly perky and enthusiastic nine-year-old. In fact, I’ve been enthusiastic my entire life, up until this fall, when high school sucked every last ounce of enthusiasm right out of me.

For the big fourth-grade field trip that year, we rode in a rattling yellow school bus out to the country to visit an organic farm. The farmers were a young couple with a baby, a flock of chickens, and four goats. They talked a lot about growing vegetables in an environmentally friendly way and evil factory farms where the cows were very, very unhappy. What I liked about the field trip was the goat cheese and the homemade bread the farmers served after we finished touring their farm. I remember having some sort of profound thought like, “Boy, farmers sure do eat good,” and suddenly my mind was made up: I wanted to live on a farm for the rest of my life.

Like I said, I was an enthusiastic kid. I was always coming up with new ideas—Let’s keep a horse in the backyard! Let’s adopt a homeless person!—and my parents were always rejecting them. So when I suggested we’d all be happier on a farm raising goats and baking bread, well, I meant it, but I didn’t expect to be taken seriously.

We were sitting at the dinner table, eating a Stouffer’s frozen lasagna that hadn’t quite gotten heated all the way through (“Think of it as lasagna sorbet,” my mother suggested, and I was so young and enthusiastic at the time that I actually tried to think of it that way), when I told my parents we should move to a farm and raise goats. I listed the many benefits of this plan (free goat cheese being number one on the list; I forget now what number two was) and sat back, waiting to be rejected yet again.

But instead of shaking her head and saying, “I’m sorry, Janie, but I just don’t think that’s going to work for us as a family right now” (which is what she said about the horse and the homeless person), my mother got very quiet. She looked at my father, her eyes sort of glimmering, a dreamy expression on her face.

“Daddy and I used to talk about living on a farm all the time,” she said after a moment. “Didn’t we, honey?”

“Before we had kids,” my dad agreed. “Back before life got so crazy.”

“Life wouldn’t be crazy on a farm,” I insisted. “It’s very peaceful on a farm.”

I had no idea what I was talking about. My farm experience consisted of one field trip and approximately two hundred picture books about Old MacDonald and Chicken Little and cows that typed. But clearly my suggestion struck a chord with my parents, who started talking about how great it would be to get out of the suburbs, to grow our own food, to raise chickens and have fresh eggs every day.

“You guys could quit your jobs,” I told them. “You could be outside in the fresh air. It would be good for your health!”

“Well, I don’t think we could quit our jobs, cowgirl,” my dad said. “In fact, I don’t want to quit my job. But it might be nice to live farther out in the country.”

I sat back in my seat, dazed. My parents were actually taking one of my ideas seriously! It made me feel important, almost grown-up.

“It’s a wonderful idea, Janie,” my mom declared.

My dad grinned at me. “A humdinger of an idea.”

Now, it did occur to me that if we lived on a farm, my best friend, Sarah, would no longer live across the street. Megan Grant, who had spent the last four months trying to steal Sarah away from me, would have full access to her while I’d be out collecting eggs in the countryside. Alone. By myself.

On the other hand, maybe my parents would finally get me a horse.

Bonus.

“Well, if you guys think so,” I said modestly. “I do think farms are nice. Especially farms with stables.”

Eight months later, we were farmers. I remember the day we moved out to the farm, the excitement I felt as I ran like a maniac up and down the stairs of the farm house, built circa 1892, with its windows that rattled with every breeze and broad oak floors that groaned in the middle of cold winter nights. I was Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables; I was a girl who lived on a farm. Outside, the honeysuckle was just beginning to bloom and the whole world smelled sweet.

And the kids at school? They thought it was cool we’d moved to a farm. We had the fifth-grade end-of-the-year party out by our pond, and the sixth-grade fall festival took place in the barn. Being Farm Girl meant social bonus points.

High school changed all of that. For one thing, no one I met in high school had fond memories of hanging out in our barnyard and feeding corn to the chickens. For another, no one thought it was cute that half the time I smelled like the barn I spent the first thirty minutes of my morning in.

They thought it was weird. They thought I was weird.

And suddenly I realized that living on a farm was weird. Milking goats and pushing a chickenmobile around the yard every morning, dumping eggshells and coffee grounds into the composter every night after the dishes were done. Knowing way too much about manure and fertilizers and the organic way to grow bok choy. What kind of normal teenage girl lived this way?

The people at school were right—I was weird.

And I only had myself to blame.