Ten Miles Past Normal - By Frances O'Roark Dowell Page 0,3

bit smaller. It’s possible that one day he’ll simply disappear into thin air and never be heard from again.

After breakfast, I pull on my Official Farming Jeans, which are jeans that are never worn for anything else but outdoor chores, so I don’t worry about what kind of muck gets on them. In fact, I hardly ever wash them, because why bother? It’s true they’ve developed a distinct odor that even Avery, Miss “I’ll Take a Bath Once a Month, but Only If Absolutely Necessary,” wrinkles her nose at, but to me that’s the point. If you’re going to give me chores that result in goat poop on my pants, you’re going to pay the olfactory price.

Next, I don my Official Farming Shirt, a blue plaid flannel shirt missing the bottom two buttons, which I wear over the “Rednecks for Peace” T-shirt my dad gave me for Christmas last year. He keeps asking me why I don’t wear the T-shirt so everyone can see it, and my answer is pretty simple: I’m not a redneck. I’m not a rural person, a country girl, or just plain folks. I’m doing my best to be a normal teenage girl here, people. That I’m for peace is entirely beside the point.

In the mudroom, I pull on my work boots, which are brown and lace up to mid-shin and could not be uglier. But when you’re stomping around in the mud, pretty foot-wear isn’t exactly a priority. In fact, as I learned so well yesterday, it should be avoided at all costs.

Now it’s time to enter Farm World with my mental mixed bag of feelings. The farm is beautiful! (It smells.) It’s natural! (It makes me smell, naturally.) It’s environmentally friendly! (It’s an environment that produces teenage girls who are shunned by their peers for smelling like their environment.)

“You used to love it here,” my mom says now when I complain about living miles away from civilizing influences, such as shopping malls and best friends. “You used to say living on a farm was the best thing ever.”

“That was back when I was a kid,” I point out. “I’ve matured.”

“Isn’t there anything you still like about it?”

My mom always looks so disappointed when she asks this. In fact, “confused disappointment” seems to be my parents’ number one reaction to me these days. Sarah says it could be worse. According to Sarah, her parents’ reactions to her plans and ideas could best be described as “shocked disapproval.” And it’s true, the Lymans can be pretty strict, but at least they don’t act like everything Sarah says and does is an indictment of their chosen lifestyle.

“It’s pretty,” I admit. “And you make great bread.”

My mom is a master baker. If you’d known her before we moved out here, you’d be flabbergasted to hear this. I mean, she was almost famous for how bad her cooking was. Who could forget the elementary school PTA bake sale in third grade, when my mom sent in a batch of chocolate-chip cookies? I handed the shoebox full of cookies over to one of the PTA moms, who chirped, “Oh, chocolate chip, my favorite!” then winked at me and whispered, “I’m going to sneak one. Don’t tell!”

She snuck, she bit, she tasted, she spat. After she recovered, she put the box under the table and smiled weakly at me. “Maybe we’ll just save these for later.”

For the most part, my mom didn’t bake, and she didn’t cook. She bought, and she thawed and reheated. She did a truckload of microwaving. But once we moved to the country, she decided to take her cooking and baking seriously. “I want to live a homemade life,” she declared, and it only took her a couple of months to figure out that baking soda was not a substitute for baking powder and that following a recipe without skipping any steps, even the boring ones, was a good thing.

So that was a definite plus side to farm life—edible cooking.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t love the farm the way I used to. It’s the kind of guilt you feel when you stop hanging out with a friend you don’t have anything in common with anymore. You think she’s great, but there’s nothing to talk about. She’s into soccer, you’re into basketball. She likes partying, you’re a library girl. She’s all about crop rotation, you’re all about not being completely humiliated walking down the halls of your high school because manure’s clinging to your shoes.

When I