“You can take the farm boy away from the farm, but you can’t take the farm away from the farm boy.”
That is a notable, age old quote that was casually quoted by some noteworthy quoter who apparently knew what he was talking about; but of whom I cannot now recollect the name. But there is far more truth than fiction in that short simple statement of fact.
It has been more than 60 years since I first left the farm to send home part of my $18 weekly office worker wage to help out those back home. But over the years, I have not been able to shake the habit of rising early in the morning. My biological clock thunders each morning silently in my brain, telling me to wake up, get up, have your morning tinkle, and-or morning constitutional, in what was once known affectionately as the two-holer out back; which was, of course outside, but has now evolved into an indoor porcelain parlour, which undoubtedly gurgles and gags on what is being flushed down its throat, almost each and every morning.
But what makes these mundane daily necessities more enjoyable for me was the forethought of my Little Lady, and the pick up of a two dollar baby monitor at a garage sale. It was installed with the inhaler out beside our shed, and, of course, the little apparatus that exhales, gobs of sound, hangs within a little cage from the ceiling of our kitchen.
Each morning, along about the half hour mark before the sun rises, a cacophony of racket erupts, from the well insulated shed, as the self-winding alarm clocks that we have housed there vie for crowing positions. To a country dweller this is not necessarily a good thing; it depends on weather whether he has reason to rise early or not. To a once-was-country-kid, now trapped in the confines of urban sprawl, this is music to the ears.
Now, as this monitor is non discriminatory as to what sound or sounds it picks up, we usually know, with little doubt, what is going on in our back yard, day and night. We hear geese flying over. We hear crows laughing at the world and its people with their Hay Haw Haw. We hear the bluejays scream, and the twitter of the warblers as they migrate.
Along about the cracking of dawn we hear our resident robin warbling to the world at large. Shortly thereafter a song sparrow sings his joy of being alive for another day. And then, both last year and this, we have a red-winged black bird, a usual swamp-land resident, who has claimed territorial rites over the small fish pond that we installed close to our deck.
The Little Lady spent all of the early morning hours out on this deck enjoying the multitude of birds that visited our big old heritage maple, and dropped randomly down to drink, or splash in the little waterfalls, which we, too, installed. The trickle of which attracts all forms of wild life.
The pool itself we had to cover with heavy gage wire in order to keep the racoons from munching our goldfish. The wire, too, kept skinny dippers from wandering in off of the street to use, with or without our permission, our pool for their daily dip.
On occasion too, if you were a before-daylight-jogger, or after-dark-passerby, you may have got a glimpse of the Little Lady swinging on our swing, which dangles from a sturdy branch of the maple. She was reluctant to enjoy swinging during daylight hours as she didn’t care to amuse people, by watching a little old silver haired lady swing.
God has given us a multitude of simple joys. If you have not geared your backyard landscape, in order to enjoy these things, then man, your biological clock is out of whack, and you don’t know how to live. It surprises me not in the least why psychiatry thrives.
Take care, ’cause we care