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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (30532)	2/10/1999 7:24:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Ish, Cumberland County, just up 70 from Effingham, a big city hereabouts. Just a mile of so south of the Interstate, on still days I could hear the traffic's roar under the blackbirds in the pond. Some beanfields, but mostly hardwood forest, oak, ash, walnut, maple, crabapple, hawthorne, and the myriad flowering purple Judas trees in the naked forest just about a month from now, and little pasture openings -- a herd of semi-wild Herefords wandering making paths and spreading ticks. And deer, and raccoon, and ducks and geese in Muddy Creek - - I know the secret that it's far nicer than the name -- and no stranger will bother to walk my woods (not posted so I am protected against law suits, and the kids ride sandhogs on my cattle trails. And quail, and even a pheasant or so (at the extreme southern edge of the range) in the old dry cornfields. I've stopped shooting them, but the GSHP wants to hunt them, so I would carry a broken gun while he points the coveys and I flush them and then we'd search down the singles. I know the four coveys that I have and count each of them carefully to see who has survived the summer and the poachers. And soon the spring rains will flood my bottom land before or after planting corn. If after I cannot plant again until they drain and I plant beans. If before I can't get into the fields until they drain and I plant beans in early june or even wheat if its still too wet. And if I've put out the broadleaf herbicide I must plant wheat, or if I've got hangover from the last year's beans I have to plant very late beans. No one could get a living from this farm, but I could get a life. And my little cropland helps my neighbor to get a living. His father sharecropped this farm and built all the buildings, then bought the place across the road, he built up a small estate, but still treated me, as does his son, as the squire who let him support his family. No one has ever quarreled over shares. He buys what he needs and bills it to me and to him. We exchange greetings. Our dogs make up one pack and indifferently patrol what is now mine and what was his and what is his alone. These are different dogs than when I lived on the land 20 years ago. They are the sons and daughters of our separate packs then. But I can see the genes of my noble Graf in the puppies of the puppies of his two female GSHP's who somehow manage to keep their breed apart. I'd planted tall strong white pines on the bluff around the house -- a house frescoed with Mantegnas with my family's faces painted on. The house is gone. Strangers use to break in and party in my stuccoed halls. They'd cut a christmas tree from my yard. And soon, there was only smoking ashes and stumps on the bluff where we used to shiver in the thunder storms and fear strangers driving up out of the night.