Author touts the joys _ and difficulties _ of country life.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

It looked like the good life. The apartment in the tony San Francisco neighborhood, the well-paid jobs in advertising.

But for Cathleen Miller and her husband, Kerby Macrae, it had all begun to seem hollow." She really wanted to write and to teach. He wanted to work with his hands.

And that's how Miller, 46, and Macrae, 43, ended up in the tiny central Pennsylvania village of Zion, renovating a beat-up 100-year-old farmhouse while she slogged through graduate school at Pennsylvania State University and he worked in a furniture factory.

Miller describes their dramatic life change in ``The Birdhouse Chronicles: Surviving the Joys of Country Life" (Lyons Press, $24.95), an absorbing, just-published account of their four-year Pennsylvania sojourn.

Besides a chance to "listen to the rhythms of life outside the noise we generated ourselves," to plant a vegetable garden, closely observe the ...