Moving to the country. Embracing a simpler, more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Growing your own food. Making do with less. These are familiar fantasies for city dwellers, especially in the wake of a worldwide financial meltdown. But what really happens when you quit the relative ease of urban living for a dirt road in the middle of nowhere?
Sonia Day reveals all in this humorous memoir. After stumbling across an old house in the country one humid July day, she fell under its strange spell. She and her spouse sold up, said goodbye to the city and embraced a radically different world, miles from the nearest convenience store. They confronted the expected realities of country living, and many more unexpected ones (marijuana grow ops, firearms, and conniving squirrels, to name a few). It wasn?t all the stuff of “back to the land? dreams, yet they persevered?with hilarious results.

?laugh-out loud funny, original , replete with shrewd observations?

? Master Gardeners

SONIA DAY is the author of The Plant Doctor, The Urban Gardener Indoors and The Complete Urban Gardener. Having moved from the city, she lives in Bellwood, Ontario.

Sonia Day's profile page

Middle-Aged Spread

by Mary E

No, I’m not moving to the country. But when I was forty-nine, I moved to the country for three years. Almost every quirky thing about old houses and living in the country that author Sonia Day experienced (except trespassers growing marijuana in the woods) happened to me, too. Somehow when Sonia writes about it, it’s funnier. I wasn’t as philosophical about finding mouse droppings in my cutlery drawer as Sonia was about tolerating squirrels in her walls.

Sonia is funny–in a self-deprecating, I’ve-got-a-secret brand of humour. She admits that as a girl, she had aspirations of being an actress. I knew I was going to enjoy her writing when she likens buying real estate to sex:
Get to the fifty mark and those two little words, real estate (and especially country real estate) take on an irresistible ring. They become the most seductive words on the planet. In fact, often as not when you’ve achieved a certain maturity, at least in years, the prospect of a fling with real estate is like sex. Only better. You get all the same ingredients–the same lustful glances, the same thrill of discovery, the same need to compete with others who have more to offer than you do, the same agonies of rejection, the same orgasmic bliss of fulfillment if you get lucky in the end–yet there’s no need to take your clothes off.

Underlying the humourous descriptions of the characters she meets in the country, and the events that thwart Sonia’s plans to plant whatever she wanted in her garden, she soon learns that the locals are a wealth of common sense about planting, that there is good reason for hunting, that dependable neighbours are a blessing, that nature is utterly mesmerizing when it’s not choking you with bindweeds, or eating the leaves off your baby plants, or scurrying in your house walls, or digging holes in the banks of your pond, or …

Sonia is polar opposite to gardening snobs she calls hoity horts, or tree-huggers she calls eco-evangelists. The country has taught her lessons: plant for the conditions, prepare for nature’s unpleasant invasions and give way in degrees, appreciate your neighbours and take their advice, get a cat (or four), enjoy the beauty and adventure of each season, look up at the stars, listen to the coyotes howl. Sonia admits that she and nature are an imperfect twosome at times. She has responded by planting beautiful floral and vegetable gardens that thrive. She won’t waste her time and resources on bending the rules.