Living The Country Life If you've been looking through the pages of various country
living type magazines, there's a chance you are incredibly depressed, because
you've seen a lot of places that look way better than your little piece
of God's green earth
Don't fret. Life is like that. Living in the country is not like owning a nice house in the suburbs. Think about it. If you move into a nifty housing development and buy a new house, the moment you move in everything looks as good as it's ever going to. The shrubs might get taller and your kids cuter -- at least until they start that piercing thing -- but that's about the extent of the positive changes. On the other hand, when you're living in the country there's nowhere to go but up. Just think of it as performance art. No, I don't mean performance art like smearing yourself with chocolate while chanting Bolivian revolutionary poetry. What I mean is that you can't get too worked up about not having everything just so. It's a journey, and sometimes you might end up in a place you did not expect. And you've got to be OK with that. Our first doorbell was a miniature Chinese gong mounted on a slice of a walnut tree. Our first wallpaper was, oh, I don't even want to tell you. Part of our decorating and landscaping scheme was based on the fact that we didn't have any money. But part of it was based on the place we were in our journey. The accidental playground Our first landscaping project was a backyard playground. We hadn't planned on building a playground, but there was the accidental alignment of several stars. I walked into the house on a beautiful June day and found all three children in front of the TV watching something remarkably brainless. That same day we'd finished drilling a new well and had several hundred feet of used iron pipe lying around. A crew from our local utility was in the neighborhood doing some work and asked if we wanted their worn out poles and empty wire spools. I looked at those huge wooden spools and thought, "Hey, they're big, they're free, of course I want them." Three days later we had a tree house, an elevated walkway built on wire spools, a huge jungle gym made of well pipe, and a swinging wooden bridge connecting everything, all of it held together with old guy wires. We're not raising grass here It was, in all honesty, incredibly ugly, but the kids loved it, and it was the right landscaping touch for us at that moment in our lives. Whenever the bare clay under the swing turned to mud and somehow ended up in the house, I'd just remind myself of the old line, "We're not raising grass here, we're raising children." A couple years later we needed a large amount of clay fill to build up a new driveway. That was when Lake Elizabeth was born, a swimming hole that later morphed into a wildlife pond. The playground finally came down a few years ago when we built rock walls and a brick patio. Now instead of a jungle gym, we have comfortable chairs overlooking our slough. We have a place to watch the wildlife, and the rock walls were built while we still had kids at home for mixing cement and carrying heavy objects. Timing is everything. When you live in the country, you can make your home into a piece of performance art, moving smoothly from a miniature car racetrack to a trampoline, and from a volleyball court to a hot tub next to the hummingbird garden. Don't get too hung up on where you're going or how long
it'll take to get there. Just enjoy the trip.
Brent Nelson lives in Southwest Virginia and is a frequent
contributor
Copyright 2003-Brent Nelson. All Rights Reserved Contact Brent Nelson c/o: editor@floydcountyinview.com |
