Look no further if you want to read a well-written story about finding yourself, and learning to live in your own skin, while making room for someone else to share the road less traveled with you.

"The word home could make me cry. I wanted one... Some people wish for world peace or an end to homelessness. I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature."

I’m quite sure I would’ve enjoyed reading The Dirty Life whenever I happened to do so, but now was heavenly — perfect timing as I contemplate the turn my own life will surely take: We’re moving from suburbia to farm-possible acreage within the coming year’s time. Our circumstances are quite different in several ways, and Kimball’s book got me to think about how large and varied the word ‘farm’ actually is. Still, she’s helped me sharpen some of the fuzzy edges about my own farmland vision with a renewed confidence and steady, no-nonsense decisiveness, and for that I’m very grateful.

"A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can’t, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. It’s blackmail, really."

There is a generosity of humor in her story as well; there is a balance of honesty that takes its turn between stripped bare hubris and humility.

Kimball writes in a way that embraces the reader within the pictures her words craft. Thankfully, she doesn’t overdo it by waxing eloquent; time and time again, her descriptions would be “just enough” for me, and the story moved on with a smooth rhythm. Delicious, in a feeding-all-your-senses kind of way.

"I was the newcomer, the know-nothing, but I had never cared so much about anything in my life. I was in love with the work, too, despite its overabundance. The world had always seemed disturbingly chaotic to me, my choices too bewildering. I was fundamentally happier, I found, with my focus on the ground. For the first time, I could clearly see the connection between my actions and their consequences. I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I believed in it. I felt the gap between who I thought I was and how I behaved begin to close, growing slowly closer to authentic. I felt my body changing to accommodate what I was asking of it."

This was a book I didn’t want to end, yet its realness is very comforting, for in reaching the final pages I was left with the reassuring certainty that all the goodness of Essex Farm continues.