Ode to a Country Road in Spring

A rural sonnet to celebrate an annual spring event.

We live for mud and potholes









Rural Sonnet #3

Our roads out here are covered in debris -
A winter's worth of cracks and holes and pits,
The asphalt honeycombed with fissures wee
and great. A mire in the center sits
In wait to swallow whole the car or truck
That dares to venture far into the wild
And messy reaches of the mud and muck
Unleashed by winter - by the monster child
Of spring, whose tantrums roar and wail in rain
And wind and hail, whose clutching, sucking, grasp
Refuses to let go who tries in vain
to travel here. Avoid the miring clasp
of country roads in spring. Far better yet
to wait a month or two until mud's set.


Yep.   For more rural poetry, see Sonnet #1 here  and Sonnet #2 here.   Enjoy.

Around the Bend

And now, for your intellectual and viewing pleasure, a Philosophical Moment. 
Brought to you by Rurification. [cue violins....]

There are a lot of bends and curves in the roads out here.  You can't see straight to where you're going, but you've got to trust that you're going in the right direction and that any detours will be lovely.   You never know what fabulous things lie just around the bend.   Enjoy the curves.

Things that come down the road

We get all kinds of interesting things on the road.   All kinds.   Once, we were driving through downtown Solsberry, and there was a donkey in the middle of the road, outside Yoho's.    He had wandered away from a neighboring house.    I wish I'd had the camera.









Lately we've been seeing a lot of these.

Box turtles.  Here's a cool page talking about the species and subspecies of Indiana box turtles.  

See if you can figure out which one this is.

Foggy Road

This road is surely leading somewhere exciting.   Just around the bend.

Winding Road

It's pretty even in bare winter.

Walking

Every evening, I take a walk down our road to the big blacktop that goes to the town village intersection where our post office is.    The blacktop is a mile down the way.  

There are woods and pastures on either side of the road. 

I pass two houses.  Three if you count the one way off the road.   

Most days I don't see any cars at all, but when I do, they slow down and we wave and maybe chat for a bit.

I often take the dog and most days K1 comes, too.

And while I walk, I think, I plan, I listen, I unwind.  Mostly, I unwind. 

I walk because I love to walk.   I love the rhythm of it.  I love all that coordinated motion. I love it when it's 97 degrees in July.   I love it in the rain.   I love it now that the weather is cooler.

I love watching things along the side of the road change - which flowers are blooming, which are going to seed, which have dried up because it's so dry.

I know where the fields smell like cumarin.   I know where the deer carcass was and approximately how many vultures were enjoying it.   I know where the walnut trees are.   And the hickories.   And the oaks.  I know where the nest of red headed woodpeckers was.   I know which fields have quail.   I know where the dead tree with 5 kinds of weird fungus is.   I know where the one stalk of arum along the whole road bloomed.    I know where the black raspberries ripened first.  

All of these things I would have missed if I had not walked by. 

A Little Dusty

These oak leaves are on our road.  They are not a fancy variegated type.    They're just plain dusty.

Everything is dusty.    The grass is dusty.   The gardens are dusty.   The cars are dusty.  The porch is dusty.   The house is dusty.   The trees are dusty.   The dirt is dusty. 

These are the conditions that produced the Dust Bowl of the 1920s.  Regularly disturbed soil and hot dry weather.    The county comes by to grade our road a few times a year - to get the potholes out of it and to smooth out the washboards.   They dump more gravel if need be.    Sometimes they make it better, sometimes they just rearrange the mess.   Always, they make more dust.