Living in the sticks

I turn left instead of right so I can sit in the car in the rain. It’s just the soy beans and the warehouses and me. I don’t feel sad or happy. I don’t feel much of anything right now, I guess.

It’s weird to me sometimes, to realize I live out in the country. The sticks. The middle of nowhere. BFE. I’ll be driving the fifteen minutes on numbered county roads “into town.”

My kids are country kids.

They know the crops alternate, that in the spring butterweed covers the fields until the machinery folds them up into the dirt and lays the tracks for the soybeans, the corn.

They know which farms have horses and which ones have cows. The fun ones are stocked with llamas and alpacas. Chickens hold their skirts up over the grass in random yards. There’s an occasional goat; here and there a pig or two–though always gray, never pink.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see a sheep but I haven’t yet, and now I wonder why.

The fences here are kind, a polite gesture. A reminder to mind the space, a request to the cows that they stay in bounds. The cows are not interested in standing, let along galumphing to the rickety wooden barrier. They give me baleful looks when I stare from the intersection, if they bother to look up at all. I like when there’s no other cars there so I can just watch them. These walking steaks were the stuff between cities on road trips, growing up. The more cows I saw, the more likely Mom would be pulling off soon to buy homemade honey. Now the apiary is next door.

I miss sidewalks. Latitude and longitude marked in concrete below my feet. A shattered square a roadmap, a satellite view of sprawling roadways. Boarded buildings burnt down houses yards garbage people walking by. People.

The corn and soy take turns in the fields, their lines so straight they wobble like ventricular puzzles when I whiz by, remain unfamiliar.

And so here I sit in the car in the rain, not feeling much aside from this perpetual in-between. Not sure what I’m homesick for.