I check in regularly with an unusual blog written by John Paul Mueller, with whom I’ve worked on several technical books. It’s unusual for lots of reasons, not the least being that it alternates recondite technical  discussions (recondite to me, anyway) with fascinating descriptions and pictures of the life of self-sufficiency that John and his wife Rebecca have adopted in the woods of central Wisconsin.

 John has written more than 80 technical books, and his credentials in that area are impeccable. But he also has intriguing insights into life on the land, where he and Rebecca raise most of their own food, tend animals, and cultivate different sorts of gardens and orchards. John recently wrote about the rock garden that Rebecca plants each year for him, visible from his window. It’s a love story about a rock garden and well worth reading, on July 8 at http://blog.johnmuellerbooks.com.

 John invited response from others with stories of relationships and self-sufficiency. Here’s what I sent him:

 Dear John—In the July 8 blog, you invited other stories about relationships. Here’s one.

 Karen and I both enjoyed your rock-garden love story, and also Rebecca’s reply. Everything you say about courtesy, working together, and expressing love is true.

 Kit (Karen) and I are coming up on our 49th anniversary in December. We decided early on that neither of us was on a pedestal, but that hasn’t kept us from loving and respecting the two very different and imperfect people we happen to be.

 Maybe the most remarkable part of our journey (so far) was the 16 months we spent mostly apart in 1993-94, when for three months I was a “professor intern” at the Scripps Howard news bureau in Washington, D.C., and then for 13 months was senior copyeditor for a government English-language newspaper in Taipei. We wrote lengthy letters and ran up big phone bills—no e-mail in that early day—but it was a long separation, even though Kit did come to Taipei for a month halfway through.

 We talked about the experience again after reading your blog. As we parted at Reagan (National) Airport in Washington, her last words were a husky, “Goodbye, love.” She says she then went to a restroom and bawled her eyes out. I carried her “Goodbye, love” like a charm through all the following months.

 She has reminded me that this was a time when I really needed to get away from my college job for a while. I would have been miserable if I’d passed up the oriental adventure that had fallen unbidden into my lap. She’s right about that. She puts her acquiescence in the adventure at least partly in terms of enlightened self-interest, but I put it in terms also of unselfish love.

 In the same period, she packed our teen-age son off for a summer in Seattle on his own, during which she was totally by herself except for four cats. Like you, I married a remarkable and most loving woman, and feel richly blessed.