I walked outside last night to take the trash out and
noticed what a beautiful, clear night it was. There were no clouds in the sky and
the stars stood out like Christmas lights on the front porch in July. I got to thinking about how easy it was to see
the stars in our yard and about how few stars could be seen in town, which made
me think about a conversation I had with my beautiful bride the other morning
on the way to work. Not the one about my
dirty boots leaving mud tracks on the freshly mopped kitchen floor but the one
about how great it is to live in the country.
The town I grew up in the first few years of my life had
fewer residents than most big city high schools have students. I mean for Pete’s
sake, we didn’t even have a Wal-Mart or a Kmart closer than 10 miles or so. We
did have our own full service gas station though, complete with a one -armed attendant (Mr Procise, I think his name was). The only thing I remembered about him was
that he lost one of his arms after a car side-swiped him and to this day, I can’t
ride with my arm out the window without thinking of his morbid warning: “You’ll end up
like me boy”.
Our back yard was connected to a couple hundred acres of corn
or soy fields, depending on the season, and our weekend getaways involved driving to my uncle’s farm an
hour away. There I got to enjoy such pleasures as spreading manure, mucking out
the pig pens, and tossing square bales into the loft. Interestingly enough, once
I got older I found out my uncle had a conveyor belt to load the loft with, but
that apparently wasn’t as much fun as watching me try to throw the bales to
dizzying heights. I learned many
wonderful lessons there, such as when my uncle tells you that there is only one
place on his whole farm where you can pee outside, check for the location of the electric fences first. Or
when you are running the John Deere with a disk set, you “go with the ROW”,
not “to the ROAD” (Sorry Unc, it's hard to hear over a diesel tractor!). Oh, and when
you play in the hay loft, don’t undo the bales, no matter how much fun it is to
jump into the scattered hay. Doing this will result in many more hours of baling.
In the summer time at our house as soon as
breakfast was over Mom opened the back door and said “Don’t come back in till
lunch time”. I happily complied because coming back into the house meant you
were bored, and being bored meant you needed something to do. “Something to do”
could mean anything from cleaning your room, organizing your clothes in the
dresser, or counting the rice in the canister. It wasn’t until a couple years
ago I found out this isn’t actually a real chore, but a way to ensure I never
complained about being bored. Oddly enough, the uncle I mentioned earlier was
mom’s brother. I wonder where they got such a devious sense of humor….
It wasn’t until I grew up and entered the insanity we call
adulthood that I began to appreciate the things my parents gave me as a child.
I’m not talking about material things; Lord knows we didn’t have much of those.
I mean the things that matter; respect, honor, dignity, and an appreciation for
a simpler life. Even within the past two years I have learned a greater love
for simplicity. Don’t get me wrong, I still like smart phones and cruise
control, but the things that really matter are those things that you can’t buy,
such as a great Wife, good kids, growing your own food, and so on. These are the things that I now live for. My
bride and I have started going for short drives around the country side on the
weekends just to get out of the house and clear our heads. During one of these
drives we happened on a small herd of deer consisting of several does, a couple
of young bucks, and multiple brightly spotted fawns. As we continued down the
roadway, we encountered several more herds of 10-15 deer. It was early evening,
the sun was just beginning to bed down and there was a smooth mist covering the
area like a light gray blanket. At
first, it reminded me of a beautiful painting, but when I finally overcame the urge to
harvest a couple of the deer for dinner and re-capped the scope, I realized
that nothing man could create could be this beautiful, and this real. And since
it was just me and my Wife, no one else in the world would ever get to see what
we were seeing at that moment in time. It was a gift to us, and only us. Folks in their high rise condos or in their
million dollar mansions in town would never have a view like this, no matter
how much money they spent. I have to
admit, it was a bit overwhelming at first and I nearly forgot that I was
driving but luckily I drive a 4X4 and once I pulled the truck out of the ditch, we drove the rest of the
way home in silence, appreciating the beauty of living in the country (and of
course the fact that I had not killed us during our excursion).
Until next time…
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