Well, I just returned from a walk in the forest. Periodically, James and I ruminate upon why we like living here and why other people tend to last about 6 months before they freak out and run screaming back to whatever urban center they came from.
My theory is that it has to do with the forest. To live here happily and be willing to put up with the various inconveniences (and there are a lot of them), you have to really, really love the trees. For us, being in the trees feels "right." In fact, when we lived in Southern California, we had to go visit trees about once a month in order to retain our mental health.
Now that we live among them, however, we don’t have to go on road trips to visit the trees. They are always here in our back yard, which is extremely convenient. In other words, amidst all the inconveniences, there is one really big convenience: proximity to the trees.
And for us, that convenience was more important than 24-hour pizza delivery service.