Country Observations…

By Joyce Davis

I recently moved from Houston city living to a town on the outskirts of San Marcos in the country. I moved in with one of my sisters who loves country life. I was born in Illinois but raised in Michigan. I can remember the day my mom told us we were going to live in Texas. I cried. I said “I don’t want to have horses and live on a farm.” Keep in mind I was 10 and my only view of Texas was the night time soap opera ‘Dallas’.

Growing up in Detroit kids used to call me country. I hated it. Now that I am older, I realize I didn’t even know what it meant but hated it only because people used it to tease me. Funny thing is when I moved to Texas and people called us Yankee I was equally as mad. It wasn’t about the actual words but the fact they were calling me something that I did not identify with. Now that I am all grown up, I don’t mind being called ‘country’. Houston really wasn’t country life. It was a melting pot of people from all over the world. Different cultures and different views. In the city you will find twenty-four-hour stores. I can remember going to shoot pool in Houston and seeing someone compete at a pool hall until 6 a.m. in the morning. It wasn’t an everyday occurrence but it sometimes happened. I recently went to check out the local pool establishment here and was informed they would be closing promptly at 12 am. Welcome to country life Joyce.

It’s almost like stepping into a time capsule. In the city; movement is constant. The lights are bright at all times of the day. Here people actually take time to smell the roses. How can you take time to smell roses if you are working at a plant twenty-three hours a day?

I weeded for the first time in my life. I never needed to before because I lived in the apartments. My sister works on a farm and I went to help her out. I observed that there is a whole community of life that we don’t acknowledge. What if we conducted ourselves after animals, bugs, or even plant life? I didn’t see one sign to build a wall to keep the wrong elements out. Flying bugs, worms, ants, lady bugs, and bugs I don’t know the names of lived together in harmony. When I disrupted a weed which happened to be their home, they did not attack me. They moved to another spot. My observation was we could learn from the bugs and the plants of the earth. Unity keeps a system going. Bugs don’t even have a union yet they find a way to coexist. They don’t know they have a job to pollinate a plant. They just do the busy work they should do and the plant gets pollinated. No complaints about other bugs not doing what they want.

I get it. We are not bugs. How dare I compare us. Thing is we are bugs. We are plants. We are a part of the earth’s ecosystem yet we are the only ones that find ways to disrupt the systems. What would happen if we were all team players?

And just for the record it would be my dream to live on a farm and have horses.