By Magda Sokolowski
Since the day we met on a rutabaga farm more than ten years ago, my husband Michael and I have shared a dream of one day homesteading. Over the years, one variation of what this would look like gave way to another as we nurtured and fed our idea of greater self-sufficiency. Sometimes, we imagined a farm with goats from whose milk we would make cheese. The idea of a large organic garden and a seasonal vegetable market was always a favorite standby in our musings, and then sometimes, I found myself in one particular reverie that came back again and again: I had visions of myself sitting at a desk, breaking from the task of writing to look out the window of our hand-built cabin onto a large meadow with a sisterhood of peaks in the distance demanding attention. And to the left (or right) of the cabin, in a patch of piñons (or maybe they would be Douglas firs or Ponderosa), I could see Michael bear the axe down on a round of wood that would soon become our heat.