Middle of Nowhere

Date: 29 January 2017

Time: 5:00pm

Temperature: 29°F (feels like 24°F)

We live in the middle of nowhere, at least that’s what I was always told. But as I grow older, I see that this might not be as true as I thought when I was younger. There always seems to be more and more cars, more and more people in our small town and along the nearby (seven-plus miles) highway. Traffic on our road has increased exponentially since I was a kid. The night sky seems not as dark as it used to be. More litter scatters the sides of the main road not far from our house.

Fortunately, some things have changed—and for the better. The trees in our backyard and in our neighbor’s property have grown taller. The weeds along the edge of the woods have grown thicker, hiding the many entrances I knew by heart as a kid but have forgotten all about now. The blackberry bushes have multiplied. The number of deer and turkey that visit our yard have grown.

But there are clues about our nowhere-ness still peak out from behind the brickwork. In the winter, we heat our house with a wood-burner. We collect wood throughout the warm months, split it, stack it, and bring it inside. It’s a long process that takes weeks, months even, to prepare but simple enough to do every single day, year after year without fail. Without this “old-school” technique, we would have to spend double, if not triple, on our electricity bill each month.

Growing up, we had a cistern. A cistern is a large container of sorts that stores water. Ours is underground behind our house, like a well. Unlike a well, we had to fill out cistern if we wanted water. Each month, the fire department would come and fill it with water for us to use. We had an electric pump that would pull the water from the cistern and bring it into the house for the shower, toilet, dishwasher, etc. We did not get city-water until mid-2006. City-water is still a privilege for us that we’re not quite use to.

From my tree, I remember this, the small little histories of our neighborhood. I can barely see the house on the hill behind our home that belongs to the gentleman (and his wife) whose father built and founded this road. The original house is still back there, granted it’s in a crumbled pile, but it’s there. My sister and I used to visit them almost one a month. We brought them Girl Scout cookies and played with their dog. The entire town knows them—and yet, somehow, no one knows where our street is.

Looking around, I can see white snow and white sky. Animal tracks litter our backyard and our neighbor’s back yard. The birds that had visited our feeders not a week ago have gone into hiding again, waiting for the cold to break. The deer and the turkeys too have gone into hibernation, coming out only to eat when completely necessary.
The air is no longer filled with the laughter and shouts of my cousins, my best friends, and me, but by the new youngsters of the neighborhood. Hopefully they have as many picnics and expeditions into the wilderness as we did. Hopefully, they establish a clubhouse somewhere far away from the prying eyes of adults, with secret codes and plans to spend the night under the stars. Hopefully, they grow to appreciate and cherish the very ground they were raised on, the very nature that made them, the very wildness that grows bees and wildflowers and far too many scars to count.