A Few Thoughts

My house sits on what used to be farm land.  Well, it was farm land 20 odd years or so ago.  I’m not the original owner of my home but the couple that it was purchased from had it built.  I bought this place because it was in the south metro and it was kinda quiet here.

And then they expanded the north/south runways at MSP.  That’s OK by me because I did spend 20 years in the Air Force and what’s a little plane noise?  I mean it’s hard for me to sleep without a little plane noise at night.

And then the Gen X couples decided that they wanted to move to the burbs to raise their families.  The other areas of the metro area were pretty well expanded and this south metro area offered all sorts of room to build new houses on.  So I watched the farm land to my west and to my south and to my east be sold off and turned into new housing areas.  It amused me when I heard people complain about “the farm smell” from the two dairy farms south of me.  They’re century farms that have milk cows.  Milk cows eat and poop and pee.  What did you expect?  I’ll hate the day that they close the farms and sell.

Little by little civilization has creeped in and taken over this area.  But nature resists as much as it can and it tries to return this place back to nature.  Every once in a while the planes aren’t flying overhead and I get a lull in traffic going by.  I can hear the birds singing even in the dead of winter and I get a sense of what this land used to once be.  It takes me back to when I was a kid growing up in southern Iowa and when I explored the wooded area and fields close to our home.

I feel sorry for the kids growing up around my place.  They’ll never know what it feels like to try to walk quietly thru the woods and try to sneak up on some squirrels or deer as they feed.  They’ll never know what it feels like to walk thru the tall grass and then having to pull the cockleburs off of your clothes.  They’ll never know what it feels, smells like and sounds like to walk thru the leaves in the woods.  Even my grands associate all of that with “getting dirty“.  They haven’t learned that “getting dirty” is a part of growing and having fun.

I’ll have to get my grands out more this coming year to explore more.  In the meanwhile I have to sit back and watch civilization encroach more and more in my area.  I can’t say that I like it.