In honor of Favorites on the 5th, we are going to travel to another world. No, I haven’t gone alien-crazy, I’m talking city v. country. I’ve always been a city gal, born and raised in Chicago, moving to the requisite suburbs to raise a family. Ah, but inside me is a country gal. I admit it – I listen to country radio and I want to live in Mayberry, or the outskirts.
This could be our farm.
And this could be us.
If you think I’m kidding, know that my library includes “If I Had a Horse How Different Life Would Be” and “Hit by a Farm”. Intellectually, I know a horse is a lot of work. Intellectually, I know a farm is a lot of work. Actually it can be worse than that. Here’s a quote from Catherine Friend’s “Hit by a Farm”
Farms have fences. People have boundaries. Mine began crumbling the day I knelt behind a male sheep, reached between his legs, and squeezed his testicles … Janet, the instructor of this course on raising sheep, had indicated it was my turn. “Grab his testicles here, around the widest part.” Wincing, I reached between the ram’s back legs with my thumb and forefinger. “Don’t pinch him,” Janet cried.
As far as the horse, my Mom grew up on a farm and knew the dark side. She never let me ride a horse. Never. Linda Martell would get to go horseback riding and I didn’t. Mike will humor me and go horseback riding on vacation. He is in firm agreement with the philosophy that says a horse is dangerous on both ends, and not so friendly in the middle. I don’t get it – how can he feel that way when he looks so happy in this picture?
Still, I’m like Owen Wilson in “Midnight in Paris”. I sometimes think I belong in another time and place. If you haven’t seen the movie, see it. That’s all I’m gonna say about it.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled program of Favorites on the 5th. I post on the fifth of every month directing you to another blog. Today, we travel to Little House in the Suburbs where you can read articles like Backyard Chickens: 5 Things I Didn’t Know and Homemade Laundry Detergent: New Tutorial.
Happy trails to you!
My romanticism about farm life faded away when I lived on a farm and had regular duty packing live turkeys into crates for trucking. Not quite at the level of squeezing ram testicles, but it did the job for me. I still like being in the countryside, but a day at the U-Pick is about as close to farming as I want to be.