Country Living

The thing people always say about Kansas is that it is so windy. Yes, it is. Today is a windy day. My problem with it is my allergies. And everything is so dry right now, so there is a lot of dust in the air.

I love my home in the country. We have multiple tall, old Cottonwood trees on all sides. They are not our trees. We didn’t plant them; nature did, I guess. They are far enough apart, though, that all kinds of trees grow in between them and around them. The Cottonwood trees are at least 20 feet tall, and the trees that grow around them are 10 feet or more, so it looks like trees box us in. I love looking out my window and just watching the limbs and leaves moving to the wind and hearing the wind roaring through the trees.

We also get wildlife walking through our yard now and then. Mother deer’s with their babies occur daily in the spring. We don’t see the wild turkeys in our yard as much as we hear them. But you see them when you’re driving down the road. Skunks, raccoon, and one time we even have armadillos, two of them. And birds, we love the birds. Cardinals are our favorite birds. We also see blue jays and bluebirds; the blue jays are mean. I’ve even seen a Meadowlark, which is our state bird. Sparrows make a nest in our clothesline pole every year. Owls, I had never heard an owl growing up because I lived in town, but I listen to them now all the time. And this year, we started feeding the hummingbirds! They are so much fun to watch. They chase each other. We think we had two pairs of hummingbirds. They are very territorial. They each want their feeder. They don’t like to share.

Nothing is happening today, which is why I spent so much time talking about the wind and trees. It’s so relaxing. When I was growing up, we lived in town; when I got married is when I moved to the country. I’ve never wanted to move back to town. It has meant living without cable TV, barely having an internet connection (because of all the trees), and no food delivery services. Suffering from allergies, but I wouldn’t trade it for any of those things.