What's Needed Most...

Some of us are born in the country.  We like the city well enough, may even live there, but after a bit it starts to press in upon us.

This lovely brown-eyed girl is a country girl at heart.  The apartment complex where

she lives  houses as many people as her former hometown. Not in the heart of the city  perhaps, but close enough.  Busy highways intersect the area around her neighborhood. 

She loves her job and her new home and the friends she's made over the past few months.  But this weekend she said she had to leave the city.  She was tense.  Deep down tired.  The city, she said, is too full of noise all the time.  There's always something going on and you find yourself busy busy, running about at the same intense pace.  

She said she needed something....something the city can't offer. 

She needed open spaces...fewer people...room to breathe...that special brand of quiet that only the country can offer.

 What's needed can only be found along old state highways where cars are few and the views expand before you.

Where roads are two lanes, not eight...

And the pace is slower.  Where the skies can be seen for miles.

 and the views remind you that all of life is not made up of traffic and sirens and honking horns and people jabbering away on cell phones in restaurants and malls and grocery store.

 

Where paved roads are not always the order of the day and the dust of a country dirt road seems cleaner breathing than citified air.

Where landmarks are part of our past and bittersweet with memory.

 

And home looks the same as it did the last time you were there.

Where tails wag when you arrive...

 And faces light up...

  

And the cat purrs...

 

And a bed is dressed with a quilt, a bit of family history meant for comfort as much as for warmth...

It's good to be home...

to wake up in the morning and listen to the sounds of bird song and turkey gobbling in the woods and watch rabbits hop across the lawn.

This is what is needed most.