I Had It All Along!

This year I can finally quit figuring and re-figuring a number in my head to see where we are at.  This month we will have lived at our current house longer than we lived at the farm, where we lived our first 18 1/2 years of married life.  A place that was so full of memories, a place we brought all six babies home to!  A place that for our oldest ones contained all of their childhood memories, for our youngest, it is just a place they hear us talk about with hardly any memories of their own. Our oldest moved to this house just one month before her high school graduation, our boys were just five and six years old.

Like just about everything else in life, there were good things and bad things about life on the farm, but over the years, the bad memories faded and they were replaced with idealized memories.  Forgotten was the living seven miles from town and all the driving that entailed when raising six kids.  No longer did I remember driving the tractor for hours on end while Mark was working in town trying to feed our eight hungry mouths!  All I remembered was the sunsets I could see from my west windows, the peace and quiet, watching it rain from the porch swing, and the countless rainbows we saw on that same swing. I remembered hearing the birds sing in the morning, the frogs croak at night, and the coyotes howling at the moon.  Heck I even missed the way our old farmhouse would shudder and rattle in the wind!  I would complain that this house was so tight you couldn't even tell what the weather was doing outside!  

I spent several years mourning the loss of those scenes and those sounds and that peace and quiet.  All I saw here was the countless trucks Mark worked on and all I heard was the traffic on the highway our house is close to.  I would daydream about how nice it would have been if we could have kept the farmhouse as a weekend getaway.  Mark always assured me that it would have been a disaster trying to keep another house, keep the grass mowed, keep it insured, keep people out of it during the week if no one lived there.  And I could see his logic, but Oh, how wonderful it would have been to get away from everything and everyone, from all the noise of this place, to just go out and sit and watch the sunset.  More and more years passed and every now and then Mark would ask if I still missed the old farm and I would answer "Yeah, I do, I miss living in the country and the peace and quiet out there."

Late in the summer, about five years ago, we got in the habit of sitting in a lawn chair as the day came to an end, visiting with each other and our son who was still at home.  I saw that I could see the sunset very well from where we were sitting, and the few trees in the way didn't take away from the view, in fact, it seemed to add to it!  Every evening we would take a glass of tea and watch the sky turn orange and pink until the big red ball dipped below the horizon.  I also loved hanging my clothes on the line outside and that summer the locust serenaded me as I hung every basket.  And then we found an old hammock at a yard sale and put it up in a couple close trees in the back yard.  Although I must admit it doesn't get laid on very often (who has time?) one Sunday morning, I laid down in it, and looking up through the pine tree above me, I watched a couple birds playing on the branches and listened to the wind gently blowing through it's needles.  The sound reminded me of what you hear when you are hiking in the Colorado mountains.  I realized I hadn't heard a single vehicle drive by all morning, all I had heard was the soft wind and the birds twittering.   "Wow Lord," I thought, "look at all the years I have wasted pining away for what was no more, when what I so desperately thought I missed was right here in front of me all along!"  

It was an eye opening moment - a "what an idiot I am" moment, and a moment that helped me see the ways I had wasted precious days of my life wishing for something different then what I already had, not seeing that God had already given me all I thought I wanted and then some.  My idealized longings of life on the farm faded into the place of realistic memories that they should have occupied all along.  And now, when Mark and I are out for a country drive, and he asks me if I still miss the farm, I can honestly answer, "Nope! Not at all!"  Now I don't see the trucks and the highway, now I see what I've got, five acres to plant a huge garden, a massive yard with big shade trees for the grandkids to play in, big enough for an impromptu football or softball game, a big clothes line to hang my clothes on, a place for my chickens and turkeys - I'd say that's just about as peaceful and quiet and country as one can get!