Saturday, January 27, 2007

take me home....country road....

i was belting out this tune yesterday as i barreled up the snowy/muddy road to my house, loaded up with groceries, animal feeds, newspapers, clean laundry and assorted treats. smilin' since i don't have to even think about getting in a vehicle and going somewhere for at least a week. i was on my way back from an overnight excursion to santa fe.
Its a 2 hour drive to get there and its like landing on another planet. Ofcourse, being santa fe, its grotesquely wealthy and conspiculously white but more than that it was the cars.....endless cars...pavement, parking lots, intersections, stop lights, some compromised excuse for air quality and that tension that comes with heavy traffic and that auto-city hurry up and wait bullshit.
wow.
car culture has taken over our lives. i don't remember having a say in this. was there a public comment period?
where are the pedestrians? the bicycles? the trains? the animals? the public markets and the children running playing thru open fields or drifts of snow? the green belts of trees and oxygen?

theres nothing uglier than a strip mall next to another strip mall flanked by gas stations and a 6 lane highway. oy veh.

now, be sure that in the midst of all that souless consumeristic hellfire i got to spend time with family friends, stock up on supplies, get some much needed body work and not lift a single piece of firewood for over 24 hours.
but man-o-man am i glad to be back on the mountain where stepping outside doesn't automatically mean then stepping into some internal combustion speeding hunk of metal and whizzing about surrounded by thousands of other speeding hunks of metal.

my hands smell of sheep grease and my face is warm from a still and sunny morning.
my feet are firmly on the ground.

3 comments:

Rosie said...

I so know that feeling. I hate going to Knoxville or even Asheville and having to drive like a city person again. You really have to be so much more aggressive. And Knoxville is a drive in a small town compared to Atlanta. Not that we don't have our crazy drivers here.

It's good to be home at the end of the day.

The kidding is officially over! Eight kids, seven survived, six does, two bucks. We are happy with the ratio.

Mallow said...

this is one sweet smiling sheep. nice photograph!

Nathan said...

You're not alone in your wondering about those things gone missing...

Peace. Please give my greetings to NM - I miss it.