I was thirty-one years old. I had two fine arts degrees, both in printmaking. “Printmaking?” an acquaintance once commented. “That’s like having a degree in dressage.” In terms of usefulness or relevance, he meant. Or employability.

I was onto something now, though, working at a graphic design and typesetting business outside of Boston. I liked it, I was okay at it, I wanted to be good at it. I wanted to be Paul Rand. (Not Rand Paul. Different guy.)

Then one morning I came into work and my employer greeted me by saying, “I’m giving you a week off, without pay, to think about what your job means to you.”

Apparently, I had been insubordinate. I hadn’t meant to be, but it’s a gift I have. I was stunned.

“What do I do now?” I said to my boyfriend, Bill.

“Let’s move to Michigan!” he said. He had twenty acres there, and a small rough cabin on a hillside. No electricity, no phone, no running water. A shack, really.

“It will be like camping, for a while,” he said.

I am not an avid camper, but I was in love and I had just been fired (sort of). I was open to ideas. We loaded up his van and my car, cat yowling from its carrier in the back seat, and drove to the middle of nowhere. We arrived in the middle of the night. It was early April, still cold. We looked at the stars for a minute, then hurried to the cabin and crawled into our sleeping bags.

And so began my apprenticeship in stepping off the hamster wheel. I had already shown tendencies. I liked to unplug my phone, which drove my mother up a wall. And, of course, I had majored in printmaking. But Bill was an expert.

“I’m not trying to prove anything,” he would say, referring to our rustic lifestyle. “I’m just cheap.”

Everyone we knew there was having work bees and building things. Before long, we had a workshop at the bottom of the hill. Bill made furniture on the ground floor; my studio was upstairs.

On winter mornings, I trundled down the snowy steps from the house with my thermos of coffee and built a fire in my woodstove. I didn’t love the icy-coldness of the room before it warmed up to a balmy fifty degrees. But I did love the feeling of having all the time in the world.

I didn’t love how broke we were sometimes. But I loved that we had decided that my job, at least for now, was to go to the studio and see what happened. A lot happened, as it turned out.

Our rustic era is long past. Somehow, we cobbled and salvaged and lucked our way into having an almost-normal house in a little town. My studio is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I have a to-do list.

But I still go into the studio with the sense that there will be time. Let’s see what happens. Maybe I can make a small wonderful thing.

I’ve thought about it a lot, with and without pay. And that’s what my job means to me.

From the May/June 2020 Horn Book Magazine Special Issue: Breaking the Rules. Find more in the "Rule Breakers" series here.