OldTroubador's blog post - My Home - repost

My home sits on a huge piece of land. It is bordered on the west and east by I-5 and I-95; south and north by I-10 and I-90. The landscape includes desert sand, pine covered mountains, green hills and broad plains. The gardens have every flower imaginable, and fruit trees and cropland fill the table with their abundance. I have water gardens that include tiny creeks and mighty rivers; small ponds and Great Lakes.
Come inside with me. The floors are asphalt and concrete, grass and moss, pine needles and brown leaves. My walls are stone and wood. My ceiling is the sky; my nightlight is the Milky Way. I hope you are not allergic to pets – I have deer and bear and foxes, to name a few. My aquaria have tiny guppies and river monsters. Look out my picture window, my windshield. You will see an ever-changing panorama; something new and different is around every corner and over every hill. My television is the biggest – it stretches from horizon to horizon.
I have got the best sound system in the world. Sit with me on the front porch and listen to the throaty growl of diesel engines dragging freight up a hill, or the barking of engine brakes trying to keep those loads from running away on the downhill. We can listen to the roar of the Saturday afternoon crowd as the batter launches one out of the park, or the infield turns a sweet double play. There are over 200,000,000 voices, in over 100 different languages, each with a story to tell, if we will just listen. From my porch, I can hear hawks keening and coyotes howling. Mockingbirds sing to me from the treetops and meadowlarks serenade me from fenceposts. At night it lulls me to sleep with the song of killdeer and katydids. And the music is simply the best – big arena concerts to small church choirs on a Sunday morn. And the sweetest sound of all – a child’s laughter. And underlying this is the sound of tires singing a joyful highway song backed up by the beat of six big cylinders pounding out the power.
Don’t worry about the neighbors, you will like them. Next door are farmers and factory workers, technicians and truckers, surgeons and secretaries. They are all good hard working people. Their work has spanned oceans, conquered a continent, and put the first footprints on the moon. They have built the biggest, the best, and the brightest. They will provide you with any service and help you any way they can. These people are not just neighbors, they are my co-workers, my friends, my family.
Let me take you into the cookhouse. Anything you want, you can have it here. And don’t worry about exotic, I have delicacies from all the countries in the world. And I hired the best chefs too – 90 year old grandmothers to the hottest young chefs can be found cooking here, preparing whatever you desire at whatever time you are hungry.
Wait a minute, do you smell that? The farmer down the road is cutting hay for the winter. And, I do declare, his wife just finished baking a couple of apple pies – you can smell them cooling on the windowsill. Climb I-40 with me from Lake Havasu City, AZ to Williams, AZ and the aroma changes from the dry desert dust to the sweet fragrance of high mountain pine. And, I smell trouble; it seems someone’s dog is going to get a tomato juice bath tonight. Let’s roll the windows down through the Smoky Mountains and revel in the sweet perfume of honeysuckle; that will get the skunk out of our heads.
Did you say you were bored? How is that possible? My home has something for everyone. I have it all, from amusement parks to zydeco festivals. Don’t make me go through the alphabet, it’s more fun to do these things than just talk about them. Have you ever been parachuting? Let’s go. Let’s ride a zip-line through a cave, or a mule train to the bottom of a canyon. Climb aboard an old steam locomotive, or learn how to drive a race car. I could spend a lifetime just going to county fairs and festivals. You say you have simpler tastes, we can sit on the side of the road in New Mexico and watch as the rock mountains change from dull to fiery with the setting sun. Or we can watch and wonder as the stars come out and burn big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.
I have a house on the east side of Texas, fifteen miles from the Louisiana border and about 80 miles from the Gulf Coast. It is where I go every six weeks or so to recharge my batteries and just relax. But my home is out there, in between the ditches. My home is the rolling hills, the sunlit trees against the sapphire blue sky. It is the great cities, the small towns, the empty land. I walk my home, my land on narrow two-lane country roads and sixteen lane super-highways. I could go on for days about my home and still not tell you everything there is. I am still discovering a lot of it myself. But this is my home. And I am proud of where I live.