Simpler Living: A year in review
By Fiona Wagner • Bankrate.com

A year ago this month, I wrote my first Simpler Living column. In it, I described how we'd moved from a semi in suburbia to a 71-acre farm in a small village in eastern Ontario.

Our dream was to slow down and get away from the hectic pace of life we found ourselves in. Truth be told, during that first year, we only managed to exchange one kind of hectic for another.

The idea of heating with wood has charmed many an urbanite (such as us) who speaks wistfully of the crackle of the fire and the aromatic scent of wood smoke. But someone has to cut and stack the wood -- back-breaking work, that -- and once the weather turns cold, both our outdoor wood furnace and our antique kitchen woodstove get mighty hungry.

Since we have over 35 acres of forest, the plan was simple: We'd harvest the wood from our own backyard. But there was one problem -- we were so busy at our day jobs, we could never seem to find the time. So, we bought about eight cords of wood for $500 (a cord measures 4 feet wide by 4 feet high by 8 feet high) -- a real bargain, we were told, as one cord of hardwood usually sells for $250 or more.

The adage holds true -- you get what you pay for, and what we got was a load of punky, soft wood. Unlike hardwood such as maple, cedar burns like paper. By late March, we were rationing out pieces and asking ourselves, "Do we really need to stoke the fire today? Maybe we could just tell the kids to put on another sweater?" Or two.

Then there's the snow. There's a lot of it in the country. Psychologically, I was prepared for it. I even tried to make light of it. "We won't have to figure out where to pile it," I told my husband, reminding him of the challenges we had managing towering snow drifts at our city house with its postage-stamp front yard. (Actually, we had more driveway than yard.)

But our country driveway is rather long and it needs to be cleared after each snowfall. After a few weeks of unrelenting snow, the novelty of roaring back and forth on the plough gets tiring fast.

Getting to know the neighbours
And of course, there's the simple culture shock of moving from a city to a village, where everybody knows everybody, and we didn't know anybody. The first few months, I felt like we stuck out like a sore thumb. And we probably did.

While we didn't have the expected parade of country neighbours coming to our door with housewarming gifts of muffins or cut flowers from the garden (it's not that kind of village, our vet later explained), the locals knew all about us.

"Yous from the city?" became the standard opening question, like there was only city out there.

"Yes," we'd reply.