Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,1

see the house with its wraparound porch, fresh white paint, cerulean blue shutters. I hear the slam of a screen door, the peaceful clucking of chickens.

Ah, yes, our farm. How relaxing to meditate on the place that has made me the laughingstock of the ninth grade and probably the biggest loser in the entire school.

And to think it was my idea to live there in the first place.

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