Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Home Sweet Home plus and minus

Prompt: The biggest plus for living in your town area.

There are lots of plus ideas here. I think if you are rural inclined it's a place with opportunities and a positive life. However, if you are looking for a particularly large income and have big plans for advancement in manufacturing or education, or technology. Those kinds of careers are around for only a few people. So, there is lots of competition for jobs like those in the area.

This property I live on has been in the family at least 150 years. It passed from my grandparents to my dad and then to me. It was a farm for the families who raised children here. Dairy cattle, work horses, then dairy cattle and tractors, then to me, horses, sheep, milk goats, with a few chickens, turkeys, ducks for just the experience. My family raised their own eggs. One of my sons sold the extra to schoolteachers for his allowance money. Two of my sons were entrepreneurs, before they left to go to higher education institutions. All three of my sons did something special with their lives. Even if it does not seem special to other people I know, they worked for what they now have in life.

I'm not sure how well another bar would be appreciated in the nearest towns. Even a fun one like Andre runs. We used to joke, that there was a bar for every church in near towns. Not so much anymore. Bars and churches exist because, of a particular batch of customers. People looking for something that one or the other can provide in a social atmosphere.

I read a psychological fact today in a website I visited. "Kindness is not flirting." It says a lot about small town and rural area living. You always have to be aware of what is going on around the area. It can be the safest place or the most dangerous place to live. Automobile accidents on rural roads at 2 or 3 a.m. where people lost their lives. When you wonder why people were out there at that time of the morning. Human prowlers at any time after midnight, when you wonder why they don't just go home and stay for the night. In a small town or rural area people can be trying to guess what you are doing or thinking instead of just talking to you. They often take what you say and twist it to mean nonsense.

Watching the deer, rabbits, counting bird species at the feeders. and the peace of caring for livestock, that becomes a way of life is one of the pluses. After my children grew up, some of them realized how much we actually had even though we could not always supply some things city kids grew up with. Not as many summer vacations. Home baked cookies instead of store-bought treats.

One Christmas instead of a big turkey dinner, which we could have had, I bought all the fixings for submarine sandwiches. I still smile at how much everyone enjoyed that as a celebration treat.

The biggest plus for me is the wilderness. Watching the Snow Geese flocks moving toward Canada in front of a storm. Looking for the Canada Geese as they move onto the Beaver Dam on an Early Spring Day. The first birds, Red Winged Black Bird scouts, arrive back even before the snow stops. This year a whole flock showed up at the feeders just the day before a weeklong snowstorm moved in. I was happy we had extra bird seed to feed them through the cold. We have deer eating apples off the ground under the apple trees and grazing on the hay fields after haying is over. The back yard shows us wild rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels. and sometimes an owl in a tree or a red-tailed hawk flying off with a rodent it caught in the field.

The green comes back into the forest at different months of the year depending on the weather. Last year we had green in the trees in early April, this year not until May.

I've lived in city homes and dwelled in trailer courts. It's easier to have real friends in a more human crowded living area. And, I miss some of the just pure friendships I had in less rural places. Still, there is no better place to watch the earth and nature just be itself, than where I am now.

Every place has its up's and down's. What is your reason for being where you are?

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