Ease Over Beauty Every Day

I have a fantasy. It goes like this: I wave goodbye to urban life and move to a commune—specifically, a commune in the Missouri Ozarks I read about in a New York Times Magazine feature a few years ago. I learn to milk cows, grow vegetables, and chop firewood; I slaughter pigs, I make herbal tinctures, I tend to the children. At night, limbs pleasantly heavy from a long day’s work, I fall asleep unaided by melatonin, alcohol, or benzodiazepines, and in the morning I rise at the rooster’s crow. There is no internet, so I read and write for long hours.