How to Live in the Country.(Column)

Byline: Cory Farley

My neighborhood, boots-and-jeans rural when I moved in, has been gentrified in two ways: slowly, then all at once. In the time it took my son to finish college, it went from chickens in most backyards to gleaming 4x4s in most garages, and a lot more garages than I'd prefer.

There be good and there be bad in this, as the pirates say. My house is worth five times what I paid for it, great news if I want to sell and move to Kansas. But I don't. I just want to putter around in my jeans, feeding my chickens.

I may open a consulting business, though, to tell newcomers how to live in the country.

No room here for a primer on California real estate, but it's been a license to print money. Tens of thousands of Golden Staters have sold their $75,000 homes for $800,000, moved to Nevada and bought $75,000 homes here for $300,000. That leaves plenty of scratch to accessorize their new country lifestyles, and they buy 1) a plaid shirt; 2) a golden retriever; and 3) a four-wheel-drive pickup that can straddle fire hydrants but will never touch dirt.

The shirt is a given, the way you might buy a cowboy hat if you moved to Texas. Cowboys wear ...