I don't know if children raised in villages, towns or cities experience the kind of solitary-ness that country children do – although that, too, may have changed with the ubiquity of computers & cell phones.
My first five years of life were spent on a 1/4 section farm in the Hoffnungsort (translated from the German as "place of hope") School District about seven miles northwest of Plum Coulee. There were two more yards on the one-mile road that passed our place, and Annie Falk, a much older girl by four or five years and only non-adult neighbour, would very occasionally come to play. Other than that, as the first child of my parents' brood, I occupied myself.
The land my father farmed was the land his father farmed. The house was the house in which he was born on a very stormy December 30, 1920. I loved that ramshackle house, that yard, that place, the quiet, the wild plum trees, the old row-crop John Deere, the woodlot littered with the detritus of the previous 50 years or so. (Ironically, after the avian siege here yesterday – which the Robins are continuing today [see onenewphotographperday], the old farmstead has been turned into a bird sanctuary.)
I've always looked at the image of this boy with his Radio Flyer wagon, playing by a hydro pole surrounded by blackened earth after a controlled grass burn, and felt a measure of pity for his circumstance. Today, from the perspective of my return to a rural domicile, I wonder where his imagination took him each day as he trundled around, his own dray horse, looking for Camelot.
More and more I value the company of solitude. This, too, is a two-edged sword. While the company is predictable and rarely bothersome, a certain myopia and misanthropy attends it. On the other hand, one is spared the quirks, foibles, idiotsynchrasies and pathologies of the selfish, acquisitive, insecure and "I'll feel better about myself if I can feel superior to you."
Life is short; too bloody short. And, yet, it can feel interminable if we allow ourselves and others to undermine our – I won't call it self-confidence – good sense of self. What is it about our species that begets such beauty and such heinous brutality? This is a topic on which I doubt I will ever shed new light, but maybe I'll take a walk in the country next week and mull it over a bit. By myself.
