The More Things Change

The More Things Change

I grew up in the country and, after a brief stint in trailer park hell my wife and I settled into a small home in an aging subdivision in Franklin. It was a nice, quite subdivision with lots of nice folks. But it was still a subdivision in town. I was a country boy who needed to be in the country. The town just wasn’t for me. I needed outside, fresh air, a big backyard.
In 2001, the dream came true. I bought six acres from father and built a house in the country. I have four acres of woods and a two-acre yard. I was back home. A little over ten years after my wife and I married and I moved out of the country, I was back home with all the farmland, fresh air, and country road to enjoy that any man short of Daniel Boone would ever need.
As a famous man once said, I told you that story to tell you this story.
In the mid-nineties in that small house in Franklin, I found myself alone one Sunday afternoon. Barry Sanders and the Detroit Lions were on television. If you are a football fan, you know of the feats of Barry Sanders and what a thrill it was for him to play the game of football. There was really no other reason to have the Detroit Lions on the television at all. Just Barry Sanders.
So there I was in the mid nineties in the house alone, my wife having gone off to take my young son to visit her mother. I sat there; with the television muted, banging out some story on a manual typewriter my grandfather had given my mother as a college present in the sixties. I was semi watching the game, but mostly whatever the story was inside of me at the time, had to come out. So, I sat there in the living room, with a piece of plywood across the top of a pair of trashcans (my desk) pounding the keyboards with the game on out of the corner of my eye.
Ah, but surely, once I made my way to the country, with all that fresh air and sunshine, my Sunday’s would be different, right?
So here I am, January 2011, and my wife has gone off to visit her mother again, leaving me alone with my ten-year old daughter. She is off in her room watching television. My oldest son – the same small child my wife took to visit her mother all those years ago – is on schedule to graduate from high school this spring.
I am looking out the backdoor into last half of my two-acre yard (the sun surely is pretty today), as I sit at a card table, with the laptop, composing this blog and rewriting a short story I recently completed.
Oh yeah, the NFC Championship game in on with the sound muted.

Just incredible, really.

Thanks for listening.