Monday, June 16, 2008

goin' to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches...

last weekend i went home to celebrate my mom's birthday with the family! today is her actual birthday...Happy Birthday Mom! on this visit to my hometown, one thing became clear to me...the longer i live in the city, the more i "see" the country. things that have always been there, that i've taken for granted, suddenly seem to jump out at me.

as i was taking a walk on our country road, i was thinking how things might look through the eyes of a city dweller. if someone had never been to the east side of washington...what would they see? what would stick out to them? here are some thoughts....

1. in one pasture you may see sheep, goats, llamas, one cow, and one horse. my question...how did that farmer know it was ok to put all of those animals together.

2. in the country everybody drives a big pickup truck and they wave at you, even if they don't know you. but, it's not a normal wave, it's the two finger picked up off the steering wheel kind of wave. sometimes you get four fingers, but very rarely, and even then it dose not leave contact with the steering wheel. i call it the farmer wave. i've seen it all my life. i've been on the receiving end of it hundreds of times and i've watched as my father greeted passersby in this same way.

3. dodging manure on the road...enough said. although i find myself wondering if a city dweller would even know that it was manure and therefore needed to be avoided.

4. duck and cover. in the city if you hear something that sounds like a gunshot or a car back firing, it most likely is one of those things. in the country this sound is actually the loud noise used to scare birds out of the cherry trees. but, even if you know what it is it can scare you to death.

5. having to stop in the middle of the road and wait for a tractor, swather, four wheeler, etc. to cross the road. the only thing you wait for in the city are the traffic lights.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just saw this today, kind of late. I am being lazy in this "country" sleeping late and going to the pool Love you