Going Country

I am a child of the suburbs through and through.  All my life I've lived in cookie-cutter housing developments, with big backyards and sidewalks and neighborhood pools and all that jazz.  This is, of course, excepting my sejours in cities like Paris and Dallas, when I lived in urban apartments, and my college years in Lexington, which was all historically charming with streets lined with 19th century homes.

Yeah, I'm pretty much your typical city-dweller/suburbanite.  But let me tell you this: I love me a good visit to the country.

My mom grew up as a true country kid, in a house built in the 1930s on land bordered by a creek, forests, and cow pastures.  So now, when Hannah (my equally suburban sister) and I go back to West Virginia with our parents to visit the relatives, we spend a great amount of time living as country folk.  At least, we do when we visit my mom's family.  My dad, like his children, grew up in a cookie-cutter neighborhood.

So this morning around 10:00, we piled into the van and drove out of town to my Mom's childhood home.  It's not more than a 15 minute ride (it's a small town), but it's a noticeable difference from my paternal grandmother's neighborhood...nothing suburban about it.

We pulled our mini van up the familiar gravel driveway, being careful as usual not to run over any wayward cats, and climbing out, we walked up the stone steps and across the grass to the circle of lawn chairs that are always assembled in my grandparents' backyard.  The chairs are set up on a brick patio that my grandfather put in years ago, which is now buckled from persistent tree roots, but which is just as welcoming as ever.  And armed with sweet tea and lemonade, there we stayed, for a good two or three hours, sitting in the shade and talking.  Throughout the morning and early afternoon, we left this lawn chair circle only to chase down an enormous turtle ambling through the lawn at a distance, to eat a lunch of sandwiches, Utz chips, and peanut butter pie, or to spend a moment standing by the window air conditioning unit at the foot of the stairs inside the house.

The afternoon was a bit more active.  As my grandmother, mother, and sister all settled in to watch All My Children and my aunt returned to her home next door to prepare dinner, my dad and I went for a walk around the property.  My grandparents own almost 20 acres of land, laid out in a rather strange format that is oblong and runs behind neighboring houses.  My dad and I first walked down to the creek bed, then around through the gardens and the "Enchanted Forest" where a former Christmas Tree lot has grown up into full pines, leaving a stretch of trees in nearly perfect alignment watching over a bed of pine needles that coats the ground.  We then walked behind the old trailers and up the newly added nature trail, which stretches like a grassy ribbon up the tree-covered ridge at the back of the property and weaves back down to the pond where my cousin Randy tried to teach me to catch frogs when we were little and past the beekeeping yard where my grandfather and my cousin Terry harvest fresh, delectable honey by the bucket load.  Then it was back to the circle of lawn chairs, for more sweet tea and more conversation.

Dinner was a tasty affair of KFC-provided chicken, garden-provided green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes, Cesar salad, and potato bread rolls, followed by peach cobbler (a late celebration of my Dad's 50th birthday in May), and a reappearance of the peanut butter pie from lunch and the carrot cake from the family picnic.  After dinner there was a puppet show (a birthday tradition), and then Hannah and I split off from the family to walk around a bit, and ended up taking my grandfather's tractors out for a spin around the property.  That's right, this suburbanite/city dweller hopped on a John Deere tractor and set off across the grass.  I can be country when I want to be.

The evening wrapped up with a visit to my grandfather's "museum" shed, where he has all sorts of things on display - things collected at auctions over the years, things picked up by a metal detector on nearby battlefields (before that sort of collecting was frowned upon), things garnered from my grandfather's work at the White House.  It's really, really, cool.  I personally like this "museum" because, unlike those silly professional museums, I get to touch everything.  I get to hold bayonets and guns from the Civil War and feel their weight, plop down in a chair that used to live in the White House, and dig through badges and spurs and bullets that are also from the Civil War and hold a Navy pilot helmet from World War II.  It's really a history buff's paradise in there.  Unfortunately, the time came to leave before we got through everything...but I plan to look through it some more over the next couple of days.

By the time we left, as the sun was setting in pink and orange hues over the fields and trees, I was worn out, stuffed with food, holding two bottles of my grandfather's honey, and my feet were covered in dirt.  And I was happy.  Really, truly happy.