From Glen to Glen

If our yard weren’t overwhelmed by the neighbor’s fir trees, and used as a playground for squirrels, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and owls, I wouldn’t mind at all having goats and chickens again. But this is not to be. We do have ants, though, which invade the house each winter; we have flickers and crows, juncos, sparrows, scrub-jays, finches, towhees, robins, wrens, and red-tailed hawks; and only a few days ago, while we were out for an afternoon stroll, a bald eagle flew low overhead in the direction of the nearby wetland, where coyotes still roam and the occasional great blue heron stops to enjoy a meditative pause on its way to the river. This seems a fair enough trade. We still miss farm life; or we think we do, for not everything about it was grand. Suffice it to say, we miss what we loved, and choose not to dwell on the rest — the widespread use of agricultural poisons, and water and air pollution, for instance, which were such a daily assault on our sanity and health that we decided to move away. As hard as it was, we’ve never regretted the decision. One strange thing, though, was leaving behind the graves of our loved ones. And so, despite my goofy wordplay in this entry from 2018, the song, “Danny Boy,” tugs ever more at the heart-strings.

[ 1974 ]