The thing about living in the country...

The garden. The garden I planted at the right time with the right plants and the right irrigation and all that jazz. The bugs really like it, too. A lot. Very few things are surviving the affection off the bugs: the garlic, the onions, the horseradish. The rest is pretty much eaten up completely or not thriving. The bugs I can't really do anything about- I am not willing to use chemicals so the solution is better varieties of plants. The not thriving I can do something about, but I have no idea what. First step is to get my soil tested at the cooperative extension.

The chicks. Which vanished overnight without even a trace feather. All six of them. The neighbor spotted and killed a fox at his coop, but we'll never really know what happened to our chicks. Gabriel was devastated. Then we lost one chicken a night for three nights in a row, despite closing them up in their coop. There were feathers for them, I guess because they were big enough to put up a fight. We're down to two hens and the rooster. One of the hens is broody, so who knows? Maybe she'll hatch some chicks for us. I'm not holding my breath. I've not mentioned this to Gabriel. He hasn't wanted to come with me to feed the chickens since the chicks went missing. All that guarding them from the cats, from the cold, from the bigger chickens. All that energy he put in, gone, *poof* just like that.

And then there are the hicks. The ones down the road with the Confederate Shrine on their front yard. The ones across the street who informed us, when we first moved in, that "We don't want to be friendly with you people." The ones further up the road who have NO TRESPASSING signs and chain on their driveway. The ones in town who rev the engines of their souped up gas-guzzling trucks and shoot eat-shit-and-die looks at brown faces. The ones who pull the Wall-Mart Yank-and-Spank on their screaming two year olds. The ones who look at me blankly at best, and suspiciously at worst, when my Jewish heritage comes into the conversation. The farmer next door who keeps mowing on our side of the property line, right before he sprays chemicals all over his land. Chemicals that don't stay on "his" side of the line, but drift all over my house instead.

And last on my (current) list of Thing I Didn't Know About Living in the Country is: the driving. A lot of it. Driving to friends because none of the kids' peers live in the neighborhood. Driving to classes. To co-op. To the grocery. To Chinese. To everywhere. I don't usually appreciate the news spin of CNN, but this article on the New American Dream, Walking Urbanism, really caught my attention. Added to this is the newly acquired knowledge that we live within 100 miles of an active nuclear power plant.

I am feeling, suddenly and without warning, that I don't want to be here anymore. Is this feeling real? Or am I bored and fabricating a thing to focus on? Is there anywhere that is really any better than this?