Vicki and her husband moved to the mountains in 1975 which makes them new people in a county where farms still in the same family after seven generations are not unusual. Though both had been teachers in Florida, they immersed themselves in the rural life, learning from their neighbors how to milk cows, churn butter, plow with mules, butcher pigs, raise tobacco and beef cattle, as well as the hundreds of other minutiae of a farm life that had changed little in a hundred years.

Except for occasional consultant work by Vicki and her husband, the milk cow related chores are now the job of the younger generation, Vicki still tends a large garden, a smaller salad and herb garden, and is continually adding to the flowers and ornamentals that threaten someday to get totally out of hand. She cans, freezes, and dries garden produce for family use. Vicki used to quilt quite a lot (and has co-authored two books on quilting under her married name). Though she has a herb garden and has made dried flower and herb wreaths in the past, it was never a business such as that described in the Goodweather books. Vicki and her family have lived in western North Carolina on a mountain farm since 1975.