Living in isolated parts of Minnesota is beautiful, but it can be a bummer if you forget to buy milk when you're in town. (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

CLITHERALL, Minn. - Last weekend I started painting a closet we’re turning into a bathroom so that we, too, can be a two-holer family.

I primed the walls and ceiling, then turned to the window trim and baseboards. Whoops! It required a different primer, and we were out of paintbrushes.

No problem, right? Just run to the store and get more. Except the nearest hardware stores, about 15 miles away, were closed just then, and the big-box stores in Alexandria and Fergus Falls were more than 30 miles away. You don’t want to drive 60-plus miles just for a paintbrush.

When you live in rural Minnesota, you have to be organized. You have to make lists and plan ahead; in other words, you need the brain of a city planner and not a writer. I can’t tell you the number of times we have driven to Fergus Falls or Alexandria only to realize upon our return that we forgot the milk or the salad dressing or the doohickey needed for the next stage of plumbing.

Now, I love living rural. Just today I stepped outside our front door into a world of bird chatter, frogs croaking, and the wind moving through the spruce trees and the cottonwoods. It fills me with peace I can’t find amid the traffic and sirens and street lights of the city. The only thing I would trade it for — maybe — is a little apartment above a shop where you can watch all the goings-on of small-town life.

But rural life does present unique challenges. Just today a long-awaited boxed set of Star Wars movies arrived by UPS, but the order was wrong. Instead of “The Empire Strikes Back” it contained two newer movies we hadn’t ordered.

“You’d better contact the seller,” I told my husband.

“Then they’re going to want us to mail back the movies we didn’t order,” he said.

Again, harder than it sounds. The nearest UPS store is in Alexandria, so we’d have to drive past dozens of old farm silos and fields, lakes, churches, cemeteries and two small towns to get there, burning a good 90 minutes of our time and nearly a quarter tank of gas. He contacted the seller anyway. We’re still waiting to hear back.

These are minor annoyances, but suppose you’re applying for a loan or health insurance or anything that requires you to print out forms and sign them. And your printer is out of ink. If the forms are urgent, that’s another 60 miles round trip to town. Let’s hear it for the vendors, companies and public agencies that allow electronic signatures.

Most Minnesotans, about 4.4 million, live in urban areas large and small, according to state figures. Another 863,000 live in rural areas near cities. About 400,000 of us live in what the state considers isolated rural areas, and even though our county, Otter Tail, isn’t considered remote rural as a whole, and we’re nowhere near the remoteness of the Northwest Angle, it would take our family more than four hours to walk to the nearest grocery store, so I think our township qualifies.

When we moved here in 2010, I wondered what happened if you needed an ambulance or the sheriff. I found out when our then-2-year-old locked himself in my husband’s truck on a hot day. My husband was gone, I didn’t have the keys, and the dispatcher said it would take the deputy about 25 minutes to get there. The answer: You rely on yourself. I had picked up a big rock and was about to smash the driver’s side window when I heard our tractor growling down the road. My husband, just in time.

Living out here fosters self-reliance. I’m constantly impressed with the people in their 80s who shovel their own driveways and split their own firewood.

There used to be more people living around here and more businesses to serve them. But then farms consolidated, families started having fewer kids, and big box stores opened within an hour’s drive, offering food and other goods for a fraction of the cost.

Like any other place, rural Minnesota is constantly evolving. If your remote area has internet access, the stores will come to you now. You can order pretty much anything you want, and in a few days the Amazon drivers and UPS trucks will rumble down your gravel road with just about anything you city slickers can get there in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It’s a life changer for people unable to drive.

Our bathroom-in-waiting is still incomplete. My husband ran to town yesterday and picked up a few paintbrushes, but it’ll still be some days before I have the time to use them.

Maybe someday drones will come to the rescue. I can order a paintbrush from the Alexandria hardware store and an employee can attach it to the drone and zip, an hour later it’ll be in my hands.

My home projects would be done in no time.