SIMPLE.

It's about seven in the morning, and around thirty-five degrees out. I'm sitting on a small, wet rock at the bottom of the hill scooping water – our drinking water – from a spring into small plastic jugs, and my thumb is slowly going numb. Hannah, I know, is washing dishes in the cabin which involves heating water on the stove and individually scrubbing, rinsing and drying each dish. And for some odd reason, we call this The Simple Life.Though I've always been fond of the term, "Simple Living" is starting to feel like a bit of a misnomer, at least on this small farm. Almost no activity is actually simple, and probably won't be for many generations to come, when the pastures are cleared and up to health; when the cabin is finished, the barns are repaired and the water systems are fleshed out. Even then, it probably won't be simple, though God-willing, it will at least be reasonable.Simple just doesn't feel right. This life is too handmade and demands too much of our attention to be considered simple. Simple was delivery pizza. Simple was living where doors opened for us, escalators did our walking, and our house heated or cooled itself at our whim. Simple was pets in lieu of herds, gas stoves instead of wood. Simple was machines that did our washing. A day off, now that was simple. And we've lived that life, but left it for what we presumed would be a simpler existence.Perhaps right now we are living more thoughtfully than simply. We have no choice. If we forget to visit the spring, we run out of water. In the summer, if we don't get our frozen jug of ice from our neighbor's chest freezer, we have no refrigeration. If we didn't have to start a fire before every meal, or before every dish washing, maybe that would make things simpler. There's just not much that's obviously simple about living this way, and sometimes that lack of simplicity—that we have to think of everything that must be done by the time dark falls—can cause us anxiety and cost us sleep.But it can also be deeply rewarding. Food we grow ourselves, cook ourselves on a wood stove we stoked ourselves, no restaurant can match. The quiet nights spent reading, writing, listening to the radio or conversing by headlamp and firelight make us  wonder what the world ever saw in television in the first place. The cabin, along with all the other odd structures we need to build, teach us how to construct (and sometimes, unfortunately, deconstruct). We're forced to preserve our bounty but enjoy the drying, fermenting and canning as a necessity, for survival. Farming naturally and living this way challenges us in the ways we like to be challenged. This life demands ingenuity and physical fitness, but in turn makes us physically fit, and OK, maybe not ingenious, but definitely doesn't hurt our problem solving skills.Maybe it's so often referred to as simple because the countryside is not thought of as an intellectual place. But we've found few things more sophisticated than the wisdom of old farmers, even if it flows from them slowly and deliberately. Perhaps it's the simple tools we use, the pitch forks and hoes, old scythes dug out of tool bins at peddler malls. Or maybe calling it simple is an ironic, inside joke we're just now getting, because although it's rewarding, it's anything but simple. (I guess I could Google why we call it "The Simple Life", but, not to belabor the point, without the internet or electricity in the cabin, that would be too simple.) Even still, we wouldn't want to live any other way. Thoughtful, rewarding, challenging living—farming with our antique tools and antique ways—that's what we've found so far, and we love it. Who needs simple anyway?- Jesse.