I’m not someone typically drawn to tales of rural life. As a child growing up in New York City watching the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres,” my sympathies were completely with Eva Gabor’s character, who pleaded “Dah-ling, I love you but give me Park Avenue!” when Eddie Albert insisted that “Farm livin’ is the life for me.” Unlike that incompatible pair, my husband and I were of one mind when we went house hunting decades ago. Upon touring the Washington, D.C., rowhouse that would become our home, we decided to put in a bid after opening the kitchen door and surveying not a grassy backyard but a concrete slab poured by a previous owner to create a grim little patio. “No mowing!” cried my husband ecstatically.

I tell these stories to emphasize that I came as a curious skeptic to Helen Whybrow’s memoir “The Salt Stones” — and emerged a convert. Whybrow’s closely observed accounts of working as a shepherd on her Vermont farm are filled with muck, sweat and a hard-won sense of the interconnectedness of the natural world. I don’t want to live her life, but reading about it has made me more aware of the teeming environment — above and below that backyard concrete slab — that I normally don’t notice.

Whybrow grew up on a homestead in New Hampshire, but left as a young adult to go to college, backpack around the world and pursue a career in editing. Eventually, she returned home to New England where she met and married her husband, Peter, an activist in land conservation. Together, they became the owners of Knoll Farm, a 200-acre working farm, as well as a “learning center for social justice and land justice.” In addition to running outreach programs, clearing plots for vegetables, “planting seven hundred blueberry bushes,” raising chickens, fixing up the old farmhouse and its outbuildings and parenting her daughter and stepdaughter, Whybrow became a shepherd. She started out some 20 years ago with eight Icelandic sheep — known for their double-ply coats and disinclination to docility — and now has a flock of close to 90.

“The Salt Stones,” as its subtitle indicates, is structured around “the seasons of a shepherd’s life.” (Its title refers to the flat rocks that sheep lick as a source of nutrients). Not surprisingly, spring is the season when that life seems most appealing. Through Whybrow’s eyes, we see a spring morning emerge: “A thin mist hovering over the ground magnifies the bright green of the world, and small birds dart in and out of the soft veil with great purpose and lilting song. The new leaves on the sugar maples behind the house look like the crumpled trembling wings of a bat, poised above tasseled blossoms of the most delicate red and gold.”

With her deliberate and revelatory narrative voice, Whybrow leads readers into a deeper recognition of how the sublime and the sinister grow side by side; how everything in that meadow is worth observing. For instance, recalling an afternoon when she and her daughter, Wren, released sheep from their paddock to munch their way through a far-off meadow, Whybrow writes: “Our pant legs are drenched and heavy with dew, the sheep stream ahead of us, calling to each other in the yellow buttercups and delicate blossoms of lady’s bedstraw … We walk after them, as if through a light-filled doorway in a dream. Wren skips ahead, and I feel as if I could walk forever, right off the milky-blue cloud edge of the world.”

Their llama, Lobo, protects the flock against predators like coyotes, which, Whybrow explains, first appeared in the 1940s after “white men had hunted wolves and mountain lions to extinction in the East.” Lobo will later be felled by a meningeal worm carried in those “tiny, gleaming golden snails in the grass, deliverers of death.”

Interconnectedness and disruption; balance and imbalance; life and death. Within the cycle of one year, Whybrow eloquently steers us readers through the rough and dirty work of her days and their larger purpose. I leave you with this image — a childhood memory of a summer working excursion with her sister — that’s magical enough to give even the most resolute city dweller pause: “We took our cows to the fair in the summer to show them for 4-H, lying down to sleep at night in the sawdust next to their warm, heavy bodies while the sounds and lights of the rides swirled overhead and the night frost coated the cows’ wet flanks like sugar.”