Writer finds fans for life's simple values.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

HARRISBURG - A train clacks along Highway 99 E. Nearby, beneath a giant oak tree, a tire swing sways in the whisper of a breeze. A little girl opens the door of a 90-year-old farmhouse, offering a smile as sunny as the September day.

You're here. Here at the home of Dorcas Smucker, whose "Letters from Harrisburg" column graces The Register-Guard's Oregon Life section each month with a touch of life beyond city and suburb. Whose first book, a collection of those columns, was released recently. And whose attention, soon after I arrive, is on a house fly.

"My grandmother always said for every fly you kill, seven come to the funeral," the swatter-wielding Smucker says.

She takes two swings and scores on the second. You imagine it's the most vicious thing the woman has ever done. Smucker's words mirror the person she seems to be: gentle, unpretentious and sprinkled with an alluring touch of wit.

"We have a deal," she writes of her insect-loving son, Matt, in a piece about mother/teen-age-son issues. "He'll take better care of his teeth, and I'll consider Madagascar hissing cockroaches."

Reading Smucker, 40, is like breathing country-fresh air. And reading her 191-page book, "Letters from Harrisburg: Ordinary Days," is like taking an extended vacation, instead of monthly visits, to simpler and saner times. (The wildest it gets in the Smucker family: `I came home from a dentist appointment and found six lambs in the kitchen.')

In the book, she writes of children and seasons and houses and heritages, the stuff that so easily gets lost amid careers, causes and technological clutter. The stuff that's woven into the lives of Mennonites such as the Smuckers cloistered on farms between Eugene and Corvallis. And the stuff she's offered since The Register-Guard made her column a regular fixture on one Sunday a month beginning in March 2000.

In a time when Lane County is getting more urban - 50 years ago, 63 percent of our population lived outside Eugene-Springfield, today only 40 percent - Smucker, a Linn County resident, has found a niche among readers.

"I often hear from her fans, but I'm more impressed by the number of times I overhear conversations about her column around town," features editor Mark Johnson says.

So why is a nonpolitical, stay-at-home mother of five (ages 4 to 17) - goodness, a minister's wife! - connecting with an audience that, as she writes in her introduction, is heavy on "liberal politics and vegetarians"?

"Although their lives or beliefs may be vastly different than hers, readers can easily identify with the subjects, people or emotions she writes about," Johnson says. "Dorcas is able to touch people of all backgrounds."

Frankly, that surprised her. "I didn't expect to resonate with people like that," she says. "The `simpler is better' theme, though, is something people relate to. We can relate to having similar needs and values, of having a hunger for the simpler life, weeding out the excess."

That's been a way of life for Smucker, who was raised Amish in Minnesota and became a Mennonite - people who eschew "worldly" pursuits such as TV but aren't as restrictive as the Amish - when she married her husband, Paul, in 1984.

She rises each day at 6 a.m. for Bible study and writing. "My style is to put off the column, then panic."

Her writing, she says, is rooted in having been raised in a family of story- tellers.

"I'm not John Grisham," she says. "I tell stories."

There is nothing particularly profound about her life, she reminds you more than once. "I'm really a klutzy, absent-minded person. I worry people will get the wrong image of me. I'm just me."

A lot of Register-Guard readers seem to think that's just fine.

Smucker's book is available by sending $13.50 plus $1 for postage to Dorcas Smucker, 31148 Substation Drive, Harrisburg, OR 97446.