By Rita McInerney

Life in the country was a gamble that Carol and Robert Nelson took about eight years ago and haven’t regretted.

They came from the suburban Baltimore area after Robert Nelson, a math and physical sciences engineer, finished graduate school. “I didn’t have a job. We moved down here taking a chance,” he recalls. But they knew they wanted to raise their family away from the congestion and confusion of a big city. They had four children at the time, now there are eight ranging from eight months to 14 years.

Even in the Baltimore suburbs, Carol says, “Children had to wear i.d. tags in school,” so many non-students were coming into the buildings and creating fear and violence. “It really worried us.”

Carroll County, GA., was a natural choice. Her parents, Alex and Catherine Corriere were nearby. Now retired, Dr. Corriere was then a French professor in the language department at West Georgia College in Carrollton. Robert was raised in Michigan.

The Nelsons selected a site about six miles beyond Whitesburg. They moved onto the heavily wooded acreage and set up housekeeping in a double width trailer. Then began the hard part, site clearing and excavation, all the labor of building a house from the ground up. Today they are comfortable in the gray and white frame house that Robert Nelson built. Beyond the clearing, large enough for a small playground for active youngsters, there are woods and a stream.

Six of the children go to the school Roopville, “I don’t have to worry about different bus schedules, all six of them ride the same bus,” Carol says. Once they leave, and Robert is off on the long ride to his job in Atlanta, “I have plenty of time to myself. It’s very quiet during the day. The baby naps and Mary Grace (she’s 3 ½) just follows me all over.” And her husband adds, “Just like chicks follow a mother hen.”

Daytime, with the melodies of birds breaking the country stillness, is a good time for Carol to reflect and relax. The serenity ends when the school bus brings the children home. That’s the time of day when Carol becomes the chauffeur, especially at this time of year, with four having to attend baseball practice in Roopville several times a week. Dinner is usually late since Robert doesn’t get home until 7 or thereabouts.

The Nelsons, both graduates of the University Michigan, where they met, are satisfied that the Roopville school is filling their children’s educational needs. “It delivers what we want, the basics and discipline. I can do the rest,” Robert says. He prefers the small town school to some in the larger cities offering humanities and social studies program that “don’t coincide with our views. They come out stuffed with ideologies, just a bunch of nonsense.

Their pastor, Msgr. Michael J. Regan, at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Carrollton, says, “All the children are strong. I’ve spoken to some of their teachers and they’re delighted to have them, they’re so responsive.”

Her children, all honor students take field trips just like their city counterparts, Carol says, to Fernbank and the High Museum in Atlanta among other places. They absorb culture at home where the rich sounds of Handel flow over the airy enclosed porch on a warm Sunday afternoon.

Robert, who believes appreciation for classic literature and music is best stimulated within the context of church, prefers to read philosophy. Both he and Carol have studied St. Thomas Aquinas on their own since college courses did not have the depth they sought. Robert claims that one good course in logic is worth an undergraduate degree.

His best course in logic came while staying at the Holy Family Hermitage in Bloomingdale, Ohio, at the time Carol’s brother, Blaise, took his final vows as a Camaldolese Hermit. There, on a bookshelf in the hermit’s cabin, he found a complete course in philosophy, books on metaphysics and logic, all of the Thomistic school.

Their formula of love with discipline is bearing results. Their first born, Thomas, 14, was state winner in the anthropology division of the social science fair for his comparison of feudal Europe and Japan. He researched, made and illustrated the panels on which he told his story, and molded and clothed figures of knights and samurai. The brick hearth of the handsome fireplace in the living room is his handiwork, his father points out. So are the concrete pillars supporting the enclosed porch off the living room. Thomas is at home in the workshop a short distance away from the 2,800 square-foot house that his father works on as he “gets the cash and the time.”

Felicity, almost 13, is a beginning cook who enjoys preparing an occasional meal for her family, and a big help with the younger children. An insatiable reader, she finished “Jane Eyre” in the fifth grade but doesn’t yet share her mother’s pleasure in Jane Austen.

Having brothers and sisters is the best preparation for life, Carol believes. There is some rivalry, naturally, but “I really think they get along quite well. They have to learn to get along with one another, they have no choice.”

One way to learn to get along with others is by sharing chores. Felicity and Catherine, almost 10, do the laundry, while Thomas, Harry, 11, and Nicholas, eight, are responsible for the trash, lawn and wood chopping. Each child has a day for kitchen help, setting the table and cleaning up after meals.

George, who will be seven July 4, and Mary Grace entertain guests, showing the visitor how to sip sweetness from a honeysuckle blossom. George likes to tell new friends that he, Mary Grace and baby Blaise are the three blue-eyed blonds of the family. They take after their father, the others have the dark brown hair and brown eyes of their mother.

Rural children have to be driven to ball practice, to dancing lessons just like their suburban counterparts. But at home there are many diversions; trees for climbing, blackberries for picking, woods for hiking, a creek for splashing in, and a little river down the road for fishing. There are kittens for cuddling, and the three dogs to chase squirrels with.

On Sunday morning the family drives 17 miles to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church outside Carrollton. There’s Mass, CCD classes and socializing with friends among the parish community of more than 400 families. The parish covers 50 square miles in Carroll and Haralson counties. “We have a growing, lively parish,” says Carol who appreciates its diversity after having lived in the northeast with its ethnic parishes.

One friend, Pat Dickson, past president of the Altar Society, had nominated Carol as parish woman of the year for 1986. Agreement from the other women was unanimous, she says. “She is a model. I think she is the perfect example for all of us.”

Carol keeps the rosary list, Pat says, and makes and repairs rosaries, a hobby that grew out of her devotion to the Blessed Mother.

The family prays the rosary together and she reads to them from the Bible. “Robert had been teaching the children from the Baltimore Catechism. We do it for a long period of time and then stop. We go back and forth,” she admits. She has sacramentals all around the house. “The children learn this way, even as babies,” she says of the crucifixes and holy pictures.

Msgr. Regan gives the Nelsons high marks for their family life. The children, he says, “Get all they need within their home.” What they do demands total commitment on the part of Carol and Robert Nelson. The faith, love and guidance they are giving today, they believe, will help their children become good parents in the years to come.

Carol and Robert Nelson reject the “notion” of being involved in parenting. He objects to the term because “you can’t make a state of being into a verb.” Being a parent, he firmly believes, is not an action but a relationship that “is for life.”