Big City, Little Country.

dinnerfour

mecorner

planewindow

marypolly

I was born in a city.  And grew up in a city.

I went to school, all the way through college… in cities.

And then, I got plucked out of city life, and hurled into a country-culture shock.  For a long time, I felt as though I simply didn’t belong.  Green Acres, revisited.

Now, some 26 years later…. I have “country” stitched into my seams.

 

And then. I visit the big cities.

A woman torn.
The poster child for displacement.
The girl without a homeplate.

Oh, I’m not complaining.  Not really.  I’m just not quite comfortable where ever it is I go.

The Big City can be a bit hoity-toity.  The high fashion and glamour, and high-nosiness of it all.
The Little Country can be confusing.  With bulls, and geldings, and sows, and fawns…. I’m never sure who is who.  Those fields and fields of planted green … … and I never quite know if it is is feed corn…. or Orville Redenbacher’s.

But I think, truth be told, I would rather be a little country.   I like a place…. where you can pull up a little patch of green grass… and sit for a spell.  To see the acres and acres of turn over-soil, waiting to be planted.  Rock-hunting in the creek is my retreat.  I love to go right down the road… and buy chicken eggs.  The small-town parades, the no-traffic jams, the folks at the grocery store, who know you by name.

This afternoon, I was in New York City.
Tonight, I am home.  In spectacular Preble County, Ohio.
Home.

But.  No matter where I go, or travel… no matter what sights, sounds or tastes I experience… no matter how grand the scale of the destination….
….. the best place I’ve ever been is home.

Home. Marvelous
Home.  That’s where I want to be.

A place to call our very own.

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
― George Moore, The Brook Kerith