Life on the homestead

I don't talk about life in Wayne a whole lot. I mean, my family comes up frequently, and occasionally I'll mention the town, but it's rare that I talk about the actual plot of land where I grew up. Maybe I'm trying not to seem like a total country bumpkin, but for all intents and purposes, that's what I am.

My parents live ten miles south of town on an 80-acre plot of land. No, they don't farm. Not even a little bit, unless you count the aspargus patch down by the beaver dam. They don't have cows or pigs or horses. It is, however, still remarkably bucolic. I walked around the section yesterday with a friend (if you don't know what a section is, it's one square mile, or 640 acres—so we walked four miles total). We scared up two deer and almost 30 pheasants, ceded the road to three tractors, and had to yell at the dog to get out of the creek four times. We commented on the fact that the farmers are running out of time to get their crops planted due to the extreme rain they've gotten here in the past month. Late planting leads to late harvest, which increases the danger of crops being killed by frost. I haven't talked or thought about this stuff since before I graduated from high school, but the interest was still there, the instinctive response to the agricultural rhythms of the region.

I was sitting on my parents' porch swing later that evening, watching the goldfinches pick birdseed out of the feeder, and wondering if I could go back to living so far from everything I've gotten used to in Houston—the theatre, businesses that stay open past ten o'clock, having people surrounding you all the time. I don't know what I would do—how I would make a living—but I think I could have sat on that porch swing forever.