I was out of town for a few days. I always love coming home. My grandparents used to have this little Swedish heart sitting on the window sill above the kitchen sink that said: Borta bra men hemma bäst. It translates to: Away is good, home is best. I love that. It’s not easy getting to the airport from where we live, in the little western little tip of North Carolina west of Asheville. I have to wake up at 4am, start up my old pickup truck and then drive through the winding mountain roads. But I love the drive. On my way home the other night, after midnight, I wasn’t in a hurry, so I wasn’t driving very fast. The speedometer on old Ruby has 55mph in yellow like “caution” so I never go above that. Actually I probably was driving closer to 40mph. All the sudden I saw a few animals appear out of the woods and run towards the road. They were coyotes, and huge ones. They darted right in front of me, to the middle of the road, but turned fast enough to escape the front of my truck by just inches. As I slammed on the brakes their eyes lit up brightly from my headlights. They were beautiful.
I’m happy to be back near the river:
And I am about to launch head first into the spring garden and chickens in the next two weeks. It’s all very overwhelming but in a good way. It takes mental preparation…at least for me.
“Even if we never go into open country, we like knowing it’s there, waiting, just in case. Outside, if only a fantasy, can be better than an endless dose of inside. And a little bit of outside can go a long way.
If you get outside, you’ll grow into its companionship, its comfort. It needn’t be a trip or planned excursion. A sleeping bag thrown down in your backyard can do the trick.
My mother gave me the outside at an early age (often only a flannel bag and a pup tent thirty feet from her door), and it made an empiricist out of me. In other words, life isn’t all that complicated. I always have the moon, the wind, or my own two feet…a soft place to rest, a fishing hole, a walk alone at night. Nothing outside resembles the complexities of four walls and a roof, especially these days, when behind the everyday door lurks and answering machine and email-devices that over schedule and over obligate us.”
-MaryJane Butters, MaryJane’s Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook: For the Farmgirl in All of Us
