Our property is quite literally in the sticks. Backwoods Alabama. You can’t hear the banjos, but it is pretty close. At dusk instead we hear a few hungry cows and a band of coyotes yipping it up.
Country folk have a way of using the outside as a storage area. Not outside within four walls, a roof and a door, maybe a roof, but not fully contained under the roof. Spilling out maybe accurate. Spilling out the door, out from under the roof, out the window and down the street. We have taken to picking up the quarter mile of dirt road of light beer cans and Mountain Dew bottles weekly when we leave. We have three neighbors past our place down a dead end road, so it is pretty disheartening to know it is one of them.
I have gotten used to hearing the gun shots daily. But gun shots in the Alabama sticks are good sounds. Target practice makes for a better hunter, and hunting-shooting thins the deer and critters that have no predators. The hunting wary deer have not eaten my luscious lettuce. This is opposite of what my parents endured for years, growning a beautiful rose bud buffet.
Mr. DALT and I are building a place where we can nestle in our woods. We took a month of weekends to tear down and move a 2 story building, deck and a toy car race track. Some dead dream of a 20-something local. Our place looks like a lumberyard. Wood is spilling out from under the carport, next to the shed, by the power pole, next to the raised beds. And still on the trailer. It is nice to be able to use your outside to store stuff.
I used the weekend to build another raised bed from the racetrack plywood and planted my tomatoes. My fancy heirloom tomatos are still at the two leaf stage so in order to get tomatoes this year I had to go to the Walmart foot tall hybrids. They will not give me seeds to grow anymore, but my sandwich will have a beefsteak on it in 45 days.
I spent the weekend thinking a lot about how to build a life in the Alabama woods, and was sad to have to close up the RV and pack up the dogs to go back to town. Back to work. But the work paid for the woods and the lumber and the tomatoes. I own those things. I’ve earned those things. The hour drive back along the country highway lets me look at what the other country folk have. Old barns, new barns, 15 tractors, trampoline in the front yard, country gas stations, empty failed restaurants, used car lots in the grass… Then I see it, in the fading light, the house right on the edge of the highway with every conceivable piece of junk in the front yard has a sign….in bright red…scrawled out on a piece of plywood…NOT FREE.
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