Apparently this is a Methodist thing? I’m not sure why they appropriated the idea. Rural doesn’t need a denomination, and I’ve known plenty of townie Methodists.

I wouldn’t actually say that I have lived a rural life—more so small-town, suburban, or exurban. The closest I got was a stint in my teens, when I lived next door to a strawberry field and down the road from an egg ranch.

I always thought I was cut from a different cloth. I wanted to live in a city where I could walk anywhere I needed to get. I wanted to live where there were shops and theaters and bars and takeout. I wanted to live in a hotel with 24-hour room service. I wanted to be entertained at any hour of any day.

And yet, every time I had a choice to Start Over, Do Something Different, Relocate—I opted for big dogs. Back yards. Distant neighbors. Turned out that a convenience store that I could drive to in under five minutes was quite sufficient, thank you. Friends would come to stay and flee after a few nights because it was “creepy dark and too quiet.”

But everything is relative, right? My mother would be positively claustrophobic whenever she visited me in my various homes and tended to leave in less than a week because the view from her bedroom window of a neighbor’s house an acre away freaked her out.

My mom has spent her happiest years living surrounded by corn and bean fields, and there is a bit to recommend it. She doesn’t have much neighborly guilt if her dogs go bananas at all hours because her nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile away. She has no idea what her neighbors are cooking for dinner because the smells don’t permeate her living room. If she was of a mind, she could toddle around her entire property stark naked with very little risk of being seen by anyone, with the remote exception of a freight train engineer who might happen by unexpectedly on the track across the street from her house—and trust me, trains are never entirely unexpected; you get plenty of advance notice to get out of sight.

My husband has often informed me that if I did not exist, he would be living in a cabin somewhere in Wyoming, a la the TV version of Longmire. I reckon he is lucky that I do exist, because given his patience with customer service types and companies’ willingness to cater to such markets, he would never see another baseball or hockey game in his life the first time his internet service glitched out. I still like visiting cities. I like waking up and only having to walk a block for a fresh cinnamon roll. But day in, day out? I’m trending rural.