Some people are pretty sure they would never want to live in a rural area, but there are advantages to it, some of which are pretty nice.   

One of the advantages of rural life is cheap housing. You can rent an apartment in a small town for half what a similar apartment would cost in a big city. You can buy a house much more easily than you could in a big city. There are a lot of houses on the market, and that drives the prices down, as well as giving you plenty to choose from. If you like privacy and quiet, you can live out of town in the country. Rural houses are often old and need some repairs, but you can get one at a price that makes that pretty easy to accomplish.

Part of rural life is driving half an hour to shop, but there’s never much traffic.  You’ll never see a traffic jam, and you may only stop at one stop sign in half an hour of driving. Drivers are courteous, too. You do have to watch out for slow-moving farm machines, but they’ll often pull to the side to let other drivers pass.

Going along with light traffic is the fun of driving a truck. Many people in rural areas have trucks, and I like mine a lot. It’s nice to sit up higher and be able to see farther, especially when the road is so straight and flat. It’s also nice to have the truck bed available if you want to go shopping for furniture or something else large. Also, the cab is small, and it heats up fast in the winter and cools down fast in the summer.

Another advantage of rural life is the people. Now, farm people can be a little cliquish. We’ve been here for twenty-six years and we’re still considered newcomers. But we didn’t really want to spend all day discussing the price of corn, anyway, so we can happily live here as 26-year newbies. For the most part, rural people are the most pleasant and friendly people you could ever find. I had a serious illness, and ladies I didn’t even know kept stopping me at church and asking how I was.

This goes for people who work in stores, banks, offices, and so forth as well. That’s because they’re the same good-natured folks who live in the small towns. They’re very friendly, and if you need something particular, they often go out of their way to be helpful.

An advantage of rural life you might not expect is that you almost never have to wait in line for anything. There just aren’t that many people here. You don’t have to wait long at the post office or the discount store or even the department of motor vehicles. You might have to wait a bit at the doctor’s because there are a lot of older residents, but even that’s not bad.

So, if your spouse wants to move to the country like Oliver on Green Acres, and you have misgivings, consider these advantages. You may end up singing, “Keep Manhattan, just gimme that countryside!”