You can play more in the country, I think. At least you don't have neighbors 6 inches away who will tattle on you to the Your Yard Must Look Like Ours Committee.

Tom and I drive past messy yards sometimes out here and I think, "Well, at least, in the country, people have a choice to leave tractors and chairs, tables, toys, pools, tents, hammocks and leaning sheds all over their front yard."

I bring this up because I am in the middle of putting a do-it-yourself-from-scrap deck in the middle of my garden. Just started on it yesterday.

Because hey, I had a light bulb moment. I'd been trying to picture a place for a flower garden surrounded by a picket fence with an arbor, which you'd step through, in the center. We take country drives and I stare at these behind 150-year-old farmhouses, strain my neck and drool all over my car window.

Well, duh! Why not put a picket fence around my vegetable garden and then grow flowers all around the edges? 

That was my light bulb moment. And almost right away I lugged up the old door from the basement and pulled the two smaller doors around from the back of the garden. And later I will lay down a wooden-slat sidewalk from the extra poor wood we have laying around here.

I used to hear lots of sermons from men in pulpits preaching against having fun, because fun can take you to some bad places. And well, yes, but it depends upon your idea of fun. And well, my idea of it is to step outside my back door in the mornings with a list of things to do out there, for suddenly I feel ten years old and set free to play and plant things in the yard or climb up the dark barn steps to the cathedral-like room up there.

We all need more fun. I drive to the city and see stressed-out people by the dozens honking their car horns and dragging their children by the arm down store aisles. They need more fun, certainly. They need to relax and realize this very moment will not come again, so why not celebrate it? And why be in such a hurry, anyway?

Both David Grayson and Dallas Lore Sharp were great ones for saying that if only everyone could live in the country, they'd be more happy, if only we could all get our hands dirty in our own gardens, we'd be more serene, less stressed.  

But of course, they'd also add that, no, not everyone would appreciate (and is created for) country life.

Yet many people would. And well, you can laugh at the three of us, but I agree. I dig in my garden and listen to birds and gaze off into our woods and think, "If only the whole world could at least give this a try, spend their days in a garden, maybe there'd be less fighting. Perhaps if everyone could paint a room for a week, make it bright and lovely, well, maybe that week would be a peaceful, contemplative one which might slow them down ever after.

Ah, don't mind me. It's this country air. I just got in from mowing the Bunny Pasture and the dreamy scent of wildflowers at the edge of the cool woods seeped right into my brain. Just the way I like it.



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