General reading.

   Please read the following text and do the comprehension exercises.  When you come across a word or phrase in blue, you may click it and watch a short video clip explaining a relevant cultural phenomenon. However, we suggest when you read the text for the first time, you should not watch any video to distract your attention.  After you finish the comprehension exercises, you may go back and click for further understanding of American and British culture.

　　

                                                    MR.DOHERTY BUILDS HIS DREAM LIFE

                                                                                                                                         Jim Doherty

        There  are two things I have always wanted to do - write  and  live  on  a  farm .Today I’m doing both.I am not in E.B.White’s class as a writer or in my neighbors’league as a farmer,but I’m getting by.And after years of frustration with city and suburban living,my wife Sandy and I have finally found contentment here in the country.

        It’s a self-reliant sort of life.We grow nearly all of our fruits and vegetables.Our hens keep us in eggs ,  with several dozen left over to sell each week .  Our bees provide us with honey  , and we cut enough wood to just about make it through the heating season.

        It’s a satisfying life too.In the summer we canoe on the river,go picnicking in the woods and take long bicycle rides . In the winter we ski and skate . We get excited about sunsets . We love the smell of the  earth  warming  and  the  sound  of  cattle lowing .  We watch for hawks in the sky and deer in the cornfields.

        But  the  good  life can get pretty tough .  Three months ago when it was 30 below , we spent two miserable days hauling firewood up the river on a sled . Three months from now , it will be  95  above and we will be cultivating corn , weeding strawberries and killing .  Recently , Sandy and I had to retile the back roof .   Soon Jim, 16 and Emily, 13, the youngest of our four children, will help me make some long-overdue  improvements  on  the outdoor  toilet that supplements our indoor plumbing when we are working outside. Later this month, Later this month, we’ll spray the orchard, paint the barn, plant the garden and clean the hen house before the new chicks arrive.

        In  between  such  chores , I manage to spend  50  to  60  hours a week at the typewriter or doing reporting for the freelance articles I sell to magazines and newspapers. Sandy, meanwhile, pursues her own demanding schedule.Besides the usual household routine,she oversees the garden and beehives, bakes bread, cans and freezes, drives the kids to their music lessons, practices with them, takes organ lessons on her own, does research and typing for me, writes an article herself now and then, tends the flower  beds,  stacks  a  little wood and delivers  the  eggs.  There is, as the old saying goes, no rest for the wicked on a place like this — and not much for the virtuous either.

        None  of  us  will  ever  forget  our  first  winter .  We  were  buried  under  five feet of snow from  December  through  March .  While one storm after another blasted huge drifts up against the house and barn,we kept warm inside burning our own wood,eating our own apples and loving every minute of it.

        When spring came , it brought two floods .  First the river overflowed , covering much of our land for weeks . Then the growing season began , swamping us  under  wave after  wave  of produce .  Our freezer filled up with cherries , raspberries , strawberries , asparagus , peas, beans and corn . Then our canned-goods shelves and cupboards began to grow with preserves‍: tomato juice, grape juice, plums, jams  and  jellies .  Eventually ,  the basement floor disappeared under piles of potatoes , squash and pumpkins, and the barn began to fill with apples and pears.  It was amazing.

        The next year we grew even more food and managed to get through the winter on firewood that was  mostly  from  our own trees and only  100  gallons of heating oil .  At that point  I  began thinking seriously about quitting my job and starting to freelance.  The timing was terrible.  By then, Shawn and Amy ,  our oldest girls were attending expensive  Ivy League school and we had only a few thousand dollars in the bank .  Yet we kept coming back to the same question :  Will there ever be a better time ?  The answer , decidedly  ,  was no  ,  and  so — with my employer ’s  blessings and half a year’s pay in accumulated benefits in my pocket — off I went.

        There  have  been  a  few anxious moments since then ,   but  on  balance  things  have gone much better than we had any right to expect. For various stories of mine, I’ve crawled into black-bear dens for   Sports   Illustrated  ,   hitched  up  dogsled  racing  teams  for   Smithsonian  magazine  ,     checked out the  Lake  Champlain  “ monster ”  for  Science  Digest  ,  and canoed through the Boundary Waters wilderness area of Minnesota for Destinations.

        I’m not making anywhere near as much money as I did when I was employed full time ,  but now we don’t  need  as  much  either . I generate enough income to handle our $600-a-month mortgage payments plus the usual expenses for a family like ours .   That includes everything from music lessons and dental bills to car repairs and college costs .  When it comes to insurance, we have a poor man’s major-medical policy . We have to pay the first $500 of any medical fees for each member of  the  family .   It picks up  80%  of the costs beyond that .   Although we are stuck with paying minor expenses,our premium is low —  only  $560  a  year — and we are covered against catastrophe .  Aside from that and the policy on our two cars at $400 a year, we have no other insurance. But we are setting aside $2,000 a year in an IRA.

        We’ve  been able  to  make up  the difference in income  by  cutting  back  without  appreciably lowering our standard of living. We continue to dine out once or twice a month, but now we patronize local restaurants instead of more expensive places in the city .  We still attend the opera and ballet in Milwaukee but only a few times a year .  We eat less meat ,  drink cheaper wine and see fewer movies. Extravagant Christmases are a memory,and we combine vacations with story assignments...

        I  suspect  not  everyone who loves the country would be happy living the way we do .  It takes a couple of special qualities. One is a tolerance for solitude. Because we are so busy and on such a tight budget, we don’t entertain much. During the growing season there is no time for socializing anyway. Jim and Emily are involved in school activities, but they too spend most of their time at home.

        The other requirement  is  energy  —  a lot of it .  The way to make self-sufficiency work on a small scale is to resist the temptation to buy a tractor and other expensive laborsaving devices. Instead, you do the work yourself .  The only machinery we own  ( not counting the lawn mower )  is  a  little  three - horsepower  rotary cultivator and  a  16-inch  chain saw.

        How much longer we’ll have enough energy to stay on here is anybody’s guess — perhaps for quite a while, perhaps not. When the time comes, we’ll leave with a feeling of sorrow but also with a sense of pride at what we’ve been able to accomplish. We should make a fair profit on the sale of the place  ,  too  .   We’ve  invested  about  $ 35,000  of our own  money  in  it  ,  and we could just about double that if we sold today. But this is not a good time to sell. Once economic conditions improve, however, demand for farms like ours should be strong again.

         We didn’t move here primarily to earn money though. We came because we wanted to improve the quality of our lives. When I watch Emily collecting eggs in the evening,fishing with Jim on the river or enjoying an  old - fashioned  picnic in the orchard with the entire family ,  I know  we’ve  found just what we were looking for. mily collecting eggs in the evening, fishing with Jim on the river or enjoying an old-fashioned picnic in the orchard with the entire family, I know we’ve found just what we were looking for.