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Yesterday (long story) I ended up riding around in a pickup truck with a dead deer in the back. (No, I didn’t shoot it!!! The only way I shoot deer is with my camera. It’s deer season here. Everyone has a dead deer in the back of their trucks…) Later, I was having this perfectly ordinary conversation with a 78-year-old woman when she told me how she’d just beaten a possum to death with a pitchfork. Sometimes, life in the country is strange….to me. But not to people who grew up in the country. Their perspective is totally different from mine. They are in closer touch with the natural world and, in their view, the hierarchy within it, which includes priorities–frugal living off the land, whether it be the chickens and cows they raise or the deer in the woods, and protection of that frugal living from wild animals.
And as my suburban spirit is sometimes aghast, I wonder…. Have I not just bought a farm? Am I not planning to acquire chickens and cows? Will I have one pretty brown pet cow named Cappuccino Cupcake….and another one named Dinner? Do I not have a hankering to raise a heritage breed of turkey, such as Bourbon Reds? And am I not planning to consume some turkey tomorrow? (As is most of the United States.) I buy nicely wrapped beef and chicken at the store on a regular basis. For every package of meat I buy, there is a farmer somewhere shielding me from the reality of how it got into my skillet. But I did not buy 40 acres to open a farm animal shelter. I bought 40 acres to engage in frugal living off the land.
Looking back in that pickup yesterday at hooves against the glass, my naive suburban perspective on poetic rural life took a hit.
Not everything about living in the country is pretty.
Posted by Suzanne McMinn | Permalink
