Culture Shock
by Donna Ball (A YEAR ON LADYBUG FARM and AT HOME ON LADYBUG FARM, Berkley Books 2009)
For most of my twenty-five year writing career I have written fantasy: the fantasy of werewolves, ghosts and time travelers; the fantasy in which murders are solved and killers brought to justice, and– what some might call the most far-fetched of all– the fantasy of the happily-ever-after love story. Real life is boring. I prefer more exotic landscapes.
In the early nineties I left the suburbs of Atlanta for a small community in the Blue Ridge mountains, and I walked into a culture more exotic than anything even I could invent. Less than one in seven homes had television, and high-speed internet was non-existent. One third of the roads were unpaved. The mail carrier located your house according to its proximity to someone he knew, or perhaps to someone’s dog (“Oh, yeah, that’s next to Joe Blakely, isn’t it? You know, the place with the white German Shepherd?”) and the only requirement for getting a library card was a reference from a local resident. When I tried to hire a housekeeper from her ad in the newspaper, she refused to return my call until she had checked my references. It took awhile, but apparently she finally located someone whose sister worked at the bank and who allowed that I seemed like a nice enough person and might be worth taking a chance on. Repairmen and contractors, if they chose to show up at all, were always on time– hardly ever on the right day, but always on time to the minute. Of course, if it was too much trouble for them to come to the actual house, they didn’t mind at all giving do-it-yourself advice over the phone… as in the time a small appliance repairman had me take apart my microwave to replace a fuse. Two days later, I decided it would be far less stressful– and ultimately cheaper–to drive to Atlanta to buy a new microwave.
I fell in love with this place, just as I fell in love with the 100 year old semi-converted barn I moved into some years later. My misadventures in restoring the old barn provided an endless source of amusement for my urbanite friends and colleagues who soon began singing a familiar song: “This is better than fiction! Why don’t you write it down?”
But as everyone knows, I only write fantasy.
Eventually, however, my experiences did find a way to weave themselves into a novel– one that is, for the first time ever, based on real life. Almost every incident in “A Year On Ladybug Farm” has happened to me, or to someone I know. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I happened to be browsing the Internet the other day and picked up on a discussion of “A Year on Ladybug Farm”.
“A fun read,” someone said, “but completely unrealistic. This would never happen to real women.”
“A complete fantasy,” agreed someone else. “These things just don’t happen in real life.”
Oh, well. I guess my friends were right– this IS better than fiction!
