I love the country

I just ate a real apple.

I have been house-sitting for one of my professors this summer. They live 30 minutes outside of Richmond back through some windy roads that pass by fields of corn, small white churches, and homemade signs advertising "Hanover Tomatoes."

Their yard backs into the birthplace of Patrick Henry and has a clearing over a crop that is unidentifiable to an ignorant city girl like me. Though I'm not a city girl through and through. And I was reminded of this when I spotted a few apple trees lining the border between the yard and the field of unknown produce. And I thought of the apple trees in the yard where I grew up--back in South Dakota. We had apple trees, cherry trees, a plum tree... And a strawberry patch that my parents tried to move unsuccessfully. (I told them--at my wise age of probably 7 or 8--that you can't move a strawberry patch.) I remember gathering apples, trying to protect the cherries from ravaging birds, and eating one plum on our back porch. My best friend lived next door, and they had rhubarb. I remember dipping it in sugar to soften it's sour taste--or maybe it was just an excuse to eat raw sugar.

I get the feeling I may have written about this before. Would not surprise me because these are fond memories. =)

While out here, I also discovered the television show Jericho. It's set in a small town in Kansas. And the point is that I'm finding I miss "small town" life. Where people know each other; where there's room to play outside and to wander and explore; where people sit out on their porches and watch the sunset; where your vision of God's creation isn't boxed in by tall buildings and cramped quarters.

Most summers, my family drives out to Colorado to visit my dad's side of the family. To get there, you have to drive across the entire state of Kansas. My brother Eric is not too fond of this drive because "there's nothing out there." I love driving across Kansas--because it's all nature out there, I guess. Crops that span out into the distance further than you could ever dream of seeing in many places. The sky looks so huge that the farms and country houses you pass look like miniature models. The open space, the colors, the vastness is just beautiful to me.

Of course I realize that all of these thoughts and memories are idealized by my romantic tendencies. But still I think there is something to be said for a simple, "country" life.


I think Kansas is a good picture of humility... level with the ground, "of earth", common, simple, unpretentious. And yet, oh so fruitful ;-)