The Oddest Thing She's Ever Said

Coyotes outside the house. I can hear the pups of the pack, yapping. It makes me smile, though the eerie sound and crying automatically and instinctively makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Country living. There’s nothing like it.

XOXO

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Morning wanders barefoot out to the garden to pick a few beans, pattypan squash, cukes, and weed in between the rows, and back.

Lovely.

XOXO

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I just made the most amazing little hummingbird friend. I was sitting out on the deck, reading, when he flew up a foot away from my face, and started squeaking at me. Yes, they actually do squeak, just like in Disney’s Pocahontas. 

I promptly started looking around for the fat raccoon.

XOXO

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Reason #165 I love living in the country: I just went outside to walk the dog one last time tonight. Without pants on. And it didn’t matter one bit.

XOXO

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The best part of my morning by far was sitting on the sofa with the 65-pound dog asleep in my lap, watching my friendly neighborhood mass-murdering cat tear the fur off of a squirrel it killed and devour it’s skull.

It was like a cross between Animal Planet: Singles Edition and CSI: Backyard.

Need more hobbies.

XOXO

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Started the morning outside on the deck, wrapped up in a blanket and my favorite oversized and fluffy flannel, reading while listening to the rain hit the tarp above me that kept me dry, and thought about life while absentmindedly scratching my old tom cat.

Ended the night in front of the warm and lively fireplace for the first time this season, alternately reading the same book from the morning, or staring at the leaping blue and yellow flames over the logs and crackling embers, thinking about absolutely nothing.

It’s funny, the things that feed our soul.

XOXO

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You know you’re country when you throw on an over-sized flannel shirt and nothing else to go barefootin’ down your driveway and yell at the electric company workers for cutting trees on your property without your consent.

My absolutely perfect fall morning has been ruined by chainsaws.

#HomeownerIssues.

XOXO

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We’re supposed to get the first frost of the season tonight here in good ol’ chilly Verh-MONT (if you’re from around here, you’ve felt the edge in the air for the past few days already, so you know what THAT means), so I spent the afternoon harvesting the last of the vegetable crops from the garden and helping pull all the still-flowering plants in potters into the house. There’s now a monster geranium plant in the corner of my room, holding my cell phone’s charger off the ground, as well as a few zinnias on the top shelf of my bookcase, far enough out-of-reach of the cat, who loves to snack on their young, tender shoots and buds.

It’s turned into not only a jungle, but a menagerie in here.

XOXO

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I just smoked and then got lost in a Good Housekeeping magazine for 3 hours.

Who am I.

The country is getting to me.

XOXO

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Baby’s First Murder Victim.

My little baby just killed his first mouse today and left it as a gift for me on the kitchen floor. A.) I’m really glad he knows where the food is prepared, and B.) GROWING UP (crazy catwoman sobs of joy and pain).

…When I lived in the city I was not like this. Close, by not quite.

XOXO

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If you were to stumble upon our property at some point in the day, completely at random, and drove down the long, rocky driveway to come across me, standing out in the middle of the lawn, you’d probably think you’d stumbled across some half-wild country woman, raised by dogs and birds of prey, clutching the bottom hem of her too-long dress up somewhere above her knees in one hand, the other fighting long, wind-tangled hair out of her face, thundercloud scowl riding across her lips. You’d wonder, perhaps, if I ever learned how to sign on the signature line in flawless, flowing cursive. You’d wonder if I voted in the last election; when the last time I was vaccinated was. 

But surprise, I’m learned— I can converse with you about wine and Renaissance art if you wish; or physics formulas in motion. I’m well-versed in state law, and have trained a voice to evoke the smoke-filled rooms and dim lighting of a 1930s jazz-club sirens. I could even speak with you in French or Italian, if you had the patience, but, chances are, if you’re a stranger coming down our driveway to find me wind-whipped and nearly feral, you don’t have the time to stop and talk on Aristotle; you’re looking for directions back to civilization. I can tell you how to get there. But I won’t be coming back with you.

This is what the country has always done best— raised well-rounded girls who look out-of-place neither barefoot in the woods, nor seated smug and content in a gallery, sketchbook in hand. Because out here, our minds have all the room and soil they need to grow.

XOXO

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