In my spare time, I like to read, have bonfires, guard my house from said bon fires with a weak , well-water supplied low-pressure hose because we live 7 "graveled" (read: muddied, pot-holed, deer-infested) miles from the nearest fire station (which according to my OTHER insurance company is a very, very L-O-N-G ways) take long walks through fields of unmowed grass, English thistles, flat thistles, abandoned fence posts, bed-pans (seriously, and not the cheap plastic kind, but really "nice" porcelain ones) felled trees, and hidden pock holes in the pasture left by long McDead'ed cattle just big enough to turn your foot *most* of the way. I'm guessing that if I were a horse, I'd a been shot for mercy's sake a long time ago. Probably a couple times. If that were possible.
I can still remember, very clearly my first August in the midwest. The heat was positively amazing. Having grown up on the rocky beaches of northern Puget Sound, I was more accustomed to the sort of humidity that actually blows into your face and makes everything cold and wet. That was a change. And the water---I was...pampered shall we say. Now, if you've lived on the plains your whole life, you likely have no idea what I'm talking about. And if you did you'd likely disagree with me. Hmph. Not much I can do about that that, except suggest skipping to the next section.
When I turned on the tap in my parents house, dew drops spilled out. Rain water, filtered by the icy glaciers on the peaks of Mt. Baker, drawn from the bubbling streams of the Nooksack river, and Whatcom Creek, tamed and contained, and piped into our homes, filled my glass. I can vividly recall the surprise and borderline sense of danger that I felt from my first coppery drink from a warm dormitory water fountain at the small private college I'd come the midwest to attend.
These things will stay with me, but one other thing---cicadas. I hated the sound of cicadas. I could hear them behind every discussion, every cd, every television show. They plagued my head. I couldn't sleep. BBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZGGGGGRRRRGGGGGLLLLLLLBBBBBBZZZZZZZ
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoff into obscurity, only to wind up again, and again.
That was 14 years ago. Yikes. My mind reels at the idea of "14 years ago."
...
When my wife and I first visited Timber Ridge (that would be this little farm), the thing that most appealed to me, besides the huge barn, was the sound. I could see cars moving on the hard surface road, a mile away, but I could *hear* the crickets in the unmowed pastures, the thousands (no joke) of small, quarter-sized frogs in the pond beyond the barn, the cows pasturing across the road, and the cicadas in the large oak and maple trees that spotted the acreage. I could hear the wind.
...
Well, we visited Timber Ridge several more times over the next 12 months. We moved in about a 14 months after that first visit. I love it here. I miss my hip urban neighborhood. I miss seeing the families that were growing up on that street. But, every day I look over to the field on the other side of the driveway, I watch my boys chasing each other around the yard, apples in hand, as they stand on the fences and yell at the cows in the next pasture, and I listen to the crickets, frogs, and cicadas----I'm *way* ok with all that.
