NONFICTION - Oct. 17, 1993

THE ROAD TO MY FARM by Nora Janssen Seton (Viking: $21; 225 pp.). Nora Janssen Seton’s husband, a banker of sorts, had all kinds of names for the dream farm craved by his spouse--”Bleating Hearts,” “Nora’s Ark,” “Farm From the Madding Crowd.” Alas, Seton never got her farm--note the book’s title--because her husband was offered a position in Zurich soon after they had found the perfect 36-acre spread in northwest Connecticut. It’s disappointing that we never find out in “The Road to My Farm” whether Seton’s hopes and fantasies jibe with reality, but the book is still charming, full of wit and intelligence and the odd, startling fact. One great appeal of farming, Seton writes, is that it allows her “to want to become a beginner again, to want to start all over again, like a child” . . . to absorb a body of knowledge, in short, with one’s guard down. Seton is no starry-eyed romantic, having worked in agribusiness for four years (following schooling at Harvard and Texas A&M;), but she does have a heart soft as fleece; summer work on ranches and farms told Seton she likes only the first half of husbandry, “the raising half.” Here’s hoping Seton eventually does attain her dream, and writes about it, so we can learn how long a working farmer continues to regard a pig litter as “a sweet pink heap of communal breathing that can only be likened to a napping rugby scrum.”