I always thought I grew up in the country.
The house I grew up in, many refer to it as “The Pink House”, backed up to a cattle farm, just on the edge of town. We had a huge mulberry tree in the backyard. Its trunk jetted left almost perfectly horizontal. It was the perfect spot to climb on to and eat mulberries for hours, overlooking the field and cows, talking with the tree and birds while imagining what life was like before houses. When we got bored we would climb through the barbed wire and chased cows or caught frogs in the creek. We knew not to go to the creek after the rain, “you might get washed away”, and we knew not to mess with the cows when the bulls were around.
But we lived in the suburbs. Construction workers whistling their catcalls at prepubescent girl friends walking barefoot down to sonic to get a cheeseburger or to Casey’s general store to buy a box of nerds with the change found in the couch cushions. Our bus stop was in our driveway. Church felt so far away, often times I would fall asleep. As an adult I see it takes 15 minutes to get to. The grocery store was one mile away. We knew two of our neighbors fairly well, one we never ever saw, and the other two, were people we knew, but didn’t ever talk to. It was the suburbs indeed!
I always felt like I needed to get out of the podunk town and visit “The City”. New York? Heck no! Kansas City. What the hell was life like there? I had no clue, until I turned 15 and convinced my oldest sister to take me to shows where people were in building basements wearing all black and no on talked to anyone….EVER. I dressed in all black, I got boyfriends whose names I didn’t even know and I grew more and more distaste for my country bumpkin home.
Eventually I moved to downtown and partied all the time. It seemed like I had a ton of friends for the first time, but it was honestly just people I always ran into. I knew one person, beside my sister, that lived in my apartment building, a 6 floor brick building in the heart of the business district. I didn’t talk to anyone unless I was drinking but I could go anywhere without a car. I walked to the grocery store, work, the library. I could catch the bus to go to the museum or ride my bike to get tacos. Life was fast and full of activity, but very empty in my human connections.
I grew very tired of my fast paced world, and for such a small time girl, I couldn’t keep up. I decided to follow my ancestors and travel west for the gold! I moved to a much smaller town in California, although, it was NOT the country, and it didn’t feel like it either! It was a college town. The older I got the harder it seemed to meet people. Or was it the closer to bigger cities, the colder everyone was?
The twists and turns my life has taken has led me to live in the country now. The lots on either side of us have no one living there. Our closest neighbor is a quarter of a mile. When we look out our window at night, we cannot see lights from any other persons houses…anywhere. The stars…imagine! Often in the summer, we take our bathing pot outside and shower freely. If the dogs are barking without stopping, someone has come close to our driveway, for long enough to raise question. We wave to everyone who drives on our road and when someone dies or is born, we take homemade pies.
Stay tuned for part two where I will list what I believe in my time traveled is “Country Etiquette”….
“It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.” -Robert Service, The Spell of the Yukon
