Jeanne Marie Laskas has a new life as a . . . what? Farmer? No, she's a freelance writer whose work has appeared in GQ, Life, and Redbook. Rural resident? Yes, but she does live on a real farm with a barn and a pond. Part-time farmer-slash-writer? Accurate, but hard to fit on a business card. Let's just say she's a card-carrying member of a new social class. Call them rural romantics. Last year, Laskas and her fiance, psychologist Alex Levy, moved from Pittsburgh to a 50-acre farm in Washington County. Their acreage came with a lovely old farmhouse, a dilapidated barn, a 1958 tractor, a pickup truck with bullet holes in it, lots of trees, and endless thickets of multiflora rose.

The couple's odyssey began when they decided to flee the noise, smells, pace, crowds, and crime of the city for a simpler life in the countryside. They weren't really thinking "farm" when they started house hunting; it was more along the lines of a "nice place" in a suburb like Cranberry Township, a rapidly growing area that had once been rural. "It was completely depressing," Laskas recalls. "It was already crowded, and there was nothing simple about it, except in the sense that residents simply drive everywhere."

The couple's search soon took them beyond bedroom communities into really rural areas. "Initially, we were caught up in the romantic aspect of just looking at farms as a lark," Laskas admits. "It wasn't as if we were being pushed out of the city. I loved my house and my neighbors, but we were seeking something different." What exactly were they looking for? Laskas, who grew up in Media, a Philadelphia suburb, has no known ancestral ties to the land. But she can trace her fascination with rural life to her childhood. "I grew up in a neighborhood that was carved directly out of farmland," she explains. "Our backyard overlooked a farm, and the house was on a hilltop in the distance, so you couldn't quite see the people who lived there. It had a certain mystique, and to me, that was the place to live."

Laskas and Levy enjoyed their weekend jaunts into the countryside so much they started including real estate agents in their search. One day, when they were following up a newspaper ad, they rounded a corner on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and found their dream farm. They offered a bid, and eventually it was accepted. Suddenly the writer and the psychologist were farmers. Sort of. "We had absolutely no knowledge of what it takes to live on a farm," Laskas recalls. "We were really stupid, and now that we're here, we are starting to realize just how stupid we are."

Stupid move or not, they love living in the country. While Levy commutes 40 miles to his practice in the city on weekdays, Laskas has set up a home office in a large room with a view of the surrounding countryside. She currently is writing a series of essays for theWashington Post Magazine on her new life. Although the couple doesn't have to farm to make a living, they are researching what to raise on their land. "It's really hilly here, so we knew we couldn't grow crops," Laskas says. "We read a lot about sheep, until I realized I was thinking of them more as pets that could mow the lawn than as a source of income. Our latest thought is horses. We're going to board horses." The couple plans to renovate their barn and install fencing for pastures.

They've already tackled some projects with gusto, although Laskas admits they've been surprised by the sheer scale of any job they've started. For instance, a local excavator spent most of the winter clearing the fields of thorny multiflora, a job that's still in progress. The couple have been lugging bags of grass seed to broadcast on the land that has been bulldozed. "The farm means endless projects," Laskas says. "But we both love doing projects, so for us it's a great thing. The flip side is that it feels as though we will never be done with these endless projects."

Country living has required an adjustment to rural culture that the couple is still dealing with. In Pittsburgh, Laskas used to lunch every day with friends. Now she walks a mile or so to the mailbox with the dogs, Betty, Marley, and Wilma. The move to the farm occurred in the middle of deer season, and the couple's decision not to allow hunting on their property has been a source of tension. "Hunting was just not part of our world, and to come face-to-face with it was a real shock," Laskas says. "People here relate to nature differently than they do in the city. There the media tell you to respect nature by recycling. We're the only people around here who have a trash service pick up the garbage. Everybody else burns it and buries what won't burn."

However, Laskas says she loves the open and accepting nature of the rural community. In the city, she regarded her home as a kind of sanctuary and did not casually invite many neighbors in. "Now I enjoy having people around the house," she says. "The bulldozer guy will come by with his son, the post office lady calls me when I have an interesting package, the clerk at the hardware store lends us equipment without even writing down our phone number.

"Out here people don't have that cynical edge they automatically have in the city," Laskas adds. "Alex and I have noticed we are so untrusting about things. We go into ventures expecting to be gypped, and we're finding we have to calm down and be open with people. There's no ulterior motive here. When we hire someone, they come out to do what they said they would do, they arrive on time, and they charge you $32.50 instead of $200. In terms of wanting to be here, I feel we really made the right choice."


–John Wall