Life in the Country

Visiting my dad is always special for me. There was something special about growing up in the country where the school bus sometimes couldn’t get up the hill and where you could play out in the woods, far enough away that you couldn’t hear your parents call you in for dinner and didn’t have to worry about anyone ‘stealing’ you. I’m glad my Dad still lives ‘up on the hill’ so that my boys can experience a little of this, too, on our visits.

Hubby and I live in ‘the village’ in a very nice little neighborhood where neighbors know each other enough to stop on the street and visit when walking after dinner, or hang over the fence to talk. It’s a great place to raise our boys. They’ll have neighborhood kids to play with and a few safe places to run to if they need to. Growing up on the hill with my Dad’s best friend and wife sharing ownership of the property I had that, but on a much smaller scale as there just weren’t as many neighbors. However, at my dad’s, there is a great freedom in being able to walk out your door, explore nature, stay out for hours and not have your parents with you. Here we don’t let our boys out by themselves, and probably won’t for a long while, as it’s busy enough to have that nagging worry about people watching your kids for a moment when you’re not there.

Dad’s property used to be surrounded on 3 sides by fields and one side by the road. Today it still has fields on 2 sides of it and the road is a bit busier, but that’s the back of the house, so it never really mattered much. Even the third side has a good boundary of trees and a hill between his house and the neighbor’s.

My boys love to run to the bottom of the property and explore the stone fence for fossils, rocks to throw into the field and search for little insects without a care, and I love the fact that I can watch from inside the house, just to keep an eye on them not wandering too far over the property line.

They’ve also been exploring the back field, looking for animal footprints to track. Grampa has a great book about tracking and last time we were there we used it as a guide to help us know what animal tracks we found. As long as they don’t find the bear that’s been seen several times up there on property farther up the hill! (Yes, another reason I watch from the window, mostly I’m watching the property.)

And of course, you never know what you’ll find at Grampa’s! This time it was a huge pile of dirt, which the boys utterly enjoyed! Something about going to my childhood home and being surrounded by nature revives me and I can’t wait to go back!