Sunday, February 12, 2012

I Like Rural

And I'm not talking Country Time Lemonade! I've told you before about our local chickens. They must have started with a few escapees, and then grown from there. Currently we only see a rooster and the two hens he always has with him (damn polygamist!) but they used to be more, lots more. There were some wild dogs around one day, and then a pile of chicken feathers, but who really knows what happened? Anyway, there only seem to be three left.

I was just out in the drive washing the car, and the chickens were right there at the side under some bushes. It gave me a real country feel, like I was out on a farm or at least a large country home. There is something about that I just love. Don't get me wrong, large cities have advantages. I don't mean I'd want to always be stuck in some backwater. Maybe just visit, like on the weekends (unless the collapse comes, when I'd definitely prefer living in a rural area, and smiling while knowing Bret Alan is dealing with the urban chaos).

My mother had an aunt (long dead now) who lived in a small town north of Birmingham, Alabama. We stayed there for nearly a week on a journey to the west that was aborted, when we turned down south again and back to Florida (and that's a story for another time). My mother's side of the family was Southern and from Alabama, and I still love hearing her stories of being served by black servants (they had a black cook, a black maid, and some other blacks just to refill their lemonade glasses on hot summer afternoons) while lazily relaxing in the sun (I wanted to throw that in because Bret Alan thinks all white southerners are racist).

Anyway, we ended up at her house in that small town. Her place sat on a little hill, and to the side and rear of the house was a large yard, although really bigger than a mere yard. She grew vegetables in a garden and had a large enough patch of grass at one side to play croquet in, which my sister and I did with some cousins of ours who we'd never met before that day. One was a boy who had a glass eye (he'd lost one eye in an accident) and his mother kept saying how she hoped he never had an accident again or he'd be blind and she worried about it because he was accident prone.

At night we actually went outside to sit on outdoor furniture and sip cold drinks while fireflies whirled around us. It was the first and last time I saw fireflies in person. I wish we had them around here where I am now, but we don't.




Well, I still remember that brief country time clearly, and kind of miss it. It wasn't my only experience of small town ruralness, however. I would go on to spend several years living way out in the country myself, and have lived in more than one small town in the Pacific Northwest. When this blog finally makes me rich (hahahahaha) I'm going to buy me a second place in the country and go there when I want to get away from the stress of big city life.

In the meantime, I've got a few chickens to keep the dream alive.

1 comment:

  1. Last summer, my dog caught a firefly in it's mouth, then licked our other dog... and for a split second, I swear I saw glowing residue where he licked.

    ReplyDelete

If the post you are commenting on is more than 30 days old, your comment will have to await approval before being published. Rest assured, however, that as long as it is not spam, it will be published in due time.

Related Posts with Thumbnails