The Birdhouse Chronicles Surviving the Joys of Country Life

Signed by author on half-title page. Light bumping on spine head. Else binding clean. Pages clean. Very light bumping on DJ spine head and top edge of front panel. Else DJ clean. ; BIH22B; 258 pages; Signed by Author

From Publisher:

In the "country house" tradition of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, Cathleen Miller has written a funny and wise account of how she and her husband abandoned their San Francisco advertising careers and cappuccinos-on-every-corner lifestyle to make a radical new life for themselves in a 100-year-old Pennsylvania farmhouse located in the middle of an Amish corn patch. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part nature writing, this wonderfully intimate first-person narrative brings home all the humor, exhilaration, and disappointment of what it's like to be an urbanite acting on the fantasy of returning to a realer, simpler life.

Miller reports on the good, the bad, and the ugly of her semisweet rural existence: raising her first garden, canning her first tomatoes, building her first fire, facing off with wild animals of unknown origins, encountering locals -- the new face of rural America -- for whom California is an alien planet, and witnessing her first UFO (which turns out to be an Amish midnight rider using his secret tractor). Through it all she provides a hammer-blow-by-hammer-blow account of how she and her husband, Kerby, refurbished their country house, removing inch by ugly inch of wallpaper and turning the place into a home with a soul and sufficient heat to sustain them through the storm of the century.

Unlike many other Green Acres-type narratives in which city dwellers make a break for the countryside, Miller sprang from a farming background, and the country is in her blood. Although she's succeeded in running from her roots during most of her adult life, she makes a gratifying peace with her past in Zion, Pennsylvania. Under the surface of her entertaining narrative runs adeeper story: the search for bedrock values in American society, values that will offer some meaning and joy to life.

Product Info

ISBN: 1585744697

ISBN-13: 9781585744695

Publisher: The Lyons Press

Year: 2002

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

Signed

Seller Info

CrossroadBooks

Address: W2565 Taylor Creek Road Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Website: https://www.crossroadbookstore.com

Country: United States