A country-fied city mouse

We forget the negative when we've been away from a place, a person, a situation. Time heals and absence makes the heart grow fonder. I've lived in rural East Texas for almost six years, and most days I find reasons to dislike it and pine away for the big city, any city. It's amazing to me that one region can be so completely devoid of culture, food, and size 2 garments. I am constantly frustrated and preoccupied with what my locale doesn't offer that I often forget to sit back and think about what I love, and why, ultimately, I really am happy. If I wasn't, I would have found a way to leave by now.

I recently finished a Nicholas Sparks book about a man who leaves his fast-paced Manhattan life for love, moving to a no-name North Carolina town. A loft apartment overlooking the city is traded for a rented room full of taxidermy. The apex of all things literary and culinary, walks in Central Park, the excitement and tension of New York streets, is exchanged for a local diner and a sad local paper. As I read the first chapters, even before the character's desolation was revealed, I felt it. I live there. In the end, the character comes to love his new home. He is even given the chance to return to Manhattan and passes it up, choosing the slow and simple saunter of southern life.

Driving home tonight, passing wooded areas and pastures made lush and green by days and days of East Texas rain, I had a flashback to my teen years, when I started driving. I grew up in Boise, Idaho, a fairly good-sized city. Not a New York, not a Chicago, not a Houston or Dallas, but big enough. Beautiful. Varied opportunities for experiencing culture, museums, street markets, shopping, entertainment, food, food, food, and recreation everywhere - skiing, river sports, hiking, biking. . .a wonderful, wonderful town. And I remembered on my peaceful drive home tonight, the traffic. As a young driver, the back-ups on well-traveled roads infuriated me. Granted I was young, extremely immature, and had no semblance of a walk with God. All the same, I didn't like the traffic.

Toward the end of my 19-year stay in the Northwest, I became disgusted with the mentality of the people, who grew more and more. . .I won't go into detail, but my political views are no longer the norm in that part of the country. In fact, looking back, it appears that God was dropping hints, setting it all up, making it miraculously easy for me to leave my childhood home, my friends of a decade or more, my golden college experience. Everything I sometimes long for now, was mine, and I had grown sick of it. It no longer mattered, I wanted John Deere Green, cowboy hats, belts with big buckles and names on the back, magnolia trees, chicken fried steak, okra, banana pudding, and Blue Bell on the front porch. I wanted to drive from my house to the post office and back and know what 80 percent of my family and friends were doing and where they were at. I wanted to find love and raise children within 15 miles of the final resting places of my great-great grandparents.

Humans are fickle. We are forever dreaming of the green, green grass that's in our line of sight, but out of our reach. Then, it seems when we finally have a moist, muddy handful of it, we want to throw it down and wipe our hands.

I often wonder what I would miss about East Texas if I were suddenly transplanted into a metropolitan area. There's no way to know for sure, however, I am confident the layered sounds of crickets, frogs, and distant birds all painted onto a background of tranquil silence would be missed when I attempted to sleep among busy city streets. In the spring, the wafting fragrance of wisteria, in the summer, the first aromas of barbecue, when those were replaced with the smells of culinary choice on a busy downtown street mixed with exhaust, I would miss my lakeside home. And, at the end of a day spent in a building built tall as a monument to mind-numbing, soul-sucking commerce, I am confident I would long for the days that my only charge was to please God, to find a way to plant one more seed, and then wait for HIM to give the increase.