Something Different...............

For those that know me intimately, my love of the outdoors is no surprise. I was raised most of my childhood on Military reservations. Every summer no matter where we were I was sent home to Georgia, to spend the summers with my Grandparents. It would be a under statement to say my Grandparents where country. Hell, they were deep under-cover country, and I loved them for it.

It was from my Grandfather and my Uncles that I learned to hunt and fish. Their patient country ways instilled a deep love and appreciation for nature in me. It was my Grandmother and my Aunts that showed me that the simplest things had their own beauty, such as a honey-suckle bush, it’s flowers fragrant in the warm summer evenings. One of my fondest memories is sitting on my Grandparents front porch at night watching the lighting bugs light up the fields that surrounded their home.

My Grandfather had a 5 acre vegetable garden in those days. It still amazes me how our labor in that big garden was transformed it into beautiful jars of great tasting , nourishing, home canned food by my Grandmother and Aunts. They were, and still are, mighty women. Both Grandparents, my Uncles and Aunts taught me a work ethic that revolved around a simple concept- If it’s worth doing, do it right.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out with my up bringing that I have always lived on the edge of the developed and undeveloped areas. It has been an effective compromise for many years. My children and I have always had access to the mainstream, but we didn’t have to deal with some of the problems with living in the mainstream. Yet in the last ten years the edges have been pushed back. I find myself no longer on the edges but surrounded by development. Development in Georgia these days is a cruel, evil process that consists of cutting down every tree, removing the top-soil, selling it, and building cookie cutter subdivisions. The irony of it all is this development initially skipped over me, so in order to get back to the edge I will now have to move twice the distance than if it had not skipped over my area.

So I was sitting on the deck this morning, sipping on my coffee, getting depressed about my current circumstances, plotting my next move, when I heard a hawk scream over head. “Dayum”, I thought, “that’s a hawk screaming”. If you have never heard a hawk or an eagle for that matter scream, I am truly sorry you haven’t. It is a pure, primal, joyous type of thang. That’s the best my limited abilities can describe it, and it made me think, “I can live where the hawks can still be heard screaming’.

Take care