June 8, 2024
Country Crossroads
When Saturday morning arrived, I woke up feeling rested from a great night of sleep. After washing up, we made coffee, toting our cups outside where we sat down to watch the sunrise.
The golden light hit the pine grove, backlighting the silhouetted trees, making the place look magical. Surely, there was a leprechaun with a pot of gold back there. Or maybe a Sasquatch? Definitely some fairies. I wasn’t sure why people needed to make up magical creatures and lands. Nature was a million times more beautiful and mysterious than anything our small brains conjured up. Nature was bigger than our dreams and our fears.
There was a slight breeze outside, and the birds were all singing, greeting the morning sun. Witnessing the first light of the day was a great way to kick off the weekend. After we finished drinking our coffee, we fed the dogs and got dressed. This morning, we were driving into Wilson for some breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.
We were excited to eat, and the food was great, although the service was a little slow. That was okay. There was no need to hurry. My wife ate her food and then suddenly felt drained. After a search party located our server, we got our bill, paid, and headed for the car. I wanted to get my wife home so she could rest.
On the drive to the restaurant, I had seen something dead on the side of the road near a stop sign. I wondered if it was a small deer, so when we came to the area, I slowed down, coming to a stop on the empty farm road. It took our brains a few seconds to process what we were seeing. My wife figured it out first. We were looking at a bag of dead chickens. Not chicken from the grocery store, but a plastic bag of fully feathered and fully dead chickens.
The sight was so strange. It reminded me of the time my wife and I were walking down the main road and came up on a pile of dead rat snakes. From then on, we adopted a saying that something or so and so was crazier than a pile of dead snakes. This morning, we had a new saying. Some things were stranger than a sack of dead chickens at a country crossroad. Real country shit.
When we arrived home, I expected my wife to lie down and rest. I’m not sure why. After getting settled, she took her computer outside and started studying. An hour later, she came inside, sat down at the dining room table, and continued her studies. I grabbed my laptop and sat down with her, completing a writing session. When we were done, we made an Amazon order that included new blinds for the living room, black rubber gloves for cleaning the Traeger grill or conducting covert assassinations, and fly paper to create a friendly landing pad for the gnats that snuck inside the house.
I took a shower and got ready for the day, while my wife left the house to shop for groceries in Wilson. While she was gone, I sat down at my desk and did a little work. When I finished, I had the honor of picking up dog poop in the backyard before running over to the county trash service center to drop it off.
My wife texted me when she was on her way back, asking me if I could pick up some frozen lemonade from the Piggly Wiggly. She knew I was going there to get some chicken to grill. I arrived home a little after her, and we worked together to unload the cars and put away the groceries.
I went outside to clean the grill, which meant taking out the grill, pulling off old burned aluminum foil from a metal plate, replacing it, and clearing out the ash from the burned pellets. I had to do all this while fighting off the dog’s attempt to kill the grill with their death by a thousand licks technique. No, I didn’t let them lick the grill, ever. As for my wife, one had to wonder. While I worked on the grill, my wife put the chicken to marinade, and we later thew it in the Traeger, letting it smoke for over an hour.
I chopped up the old produce my wife had pulled out of the refrigerator and took it out to the worms along with some water to keep the soil in the bins moist. There were so many worms and they were all growing fat. I made a mental note that I needed to go fishing.
While the chicken wings smoked, my wife and I sat outside and relaxed together, taking in the scenic view of our backyard. We put on some music and sat down, talking about everything under the sun. Communicating and interacting was one of our favorite things to do. Whether it was something I wanted to share with her, something that was bothering me, or some pointless thought about the world, I always felt satisfied after an evening of talking with my wife. And I loved listening to her. She was so funny, and a sometimes sweet and often ruthless observer.
When the food was done, we sat outside and ate at the table on the deck. The wings were delectable, and we feasted like barbarians. When we had eaten our fill, we gathered several fruit and vegetable scraps and carried them to the trailhead for the wild animals.
The trail was dark, but we walked down, winding around the tall cedar trees. When we came out of the woods, we moved along the tree line, observing all the fireflies and checking all the different trees and plants. We even picked a few wild blackberries and took them back with us to the house to wash.
It was a lovely Saturday that provided some much needed time off from school and work. As I showered and got ready for bed, I found a YouTube recording of Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance. I listened for about a half hour, taking in the words and ideas that I had read so many times before. Wasn’t it lovely that while each day was unique, it offered us an opportunity to do things better than the day before? This made me grateful for today, and excited for tomorrow.