Sounds and Colors

I love walking outside and picking my breakfast off the vine.

Rachel and I have been emailing a bit about the differences between her new home in Atlanta and her old home in Nebraska.  They are both full of colors and sights and sounds, but in very different ways.  She wrote:

This morning I paid the train fare for a homeless man who was dragging on a cigarette and asked me "could you buy me 3 or 4 trips?"  (I paid for 2 - $5).  He seemed very thankful and kept saying "God bless you, sweetie, God bless you, you have a wonderful day" until I was out of sight.  Then as I walked to my office building I went by another homeless man, perched on the side of a garden planter, singing gospel music at full volume.  A big black lady walked by and shouted, "Hallelujah!" and he shouted right back, "Amen!"  Guess I'm back in Atlanta.

I thought about Rachel's day and my day.  Sometimes it is amazing that big city Georgia and our farm in Nebraska are on the same planet, much less a part of the same sovereign nation.  Last night, I was gardening with Audrey toward dusk.  I heard an owl, and then, while I waited to hear it again with my head cocked, a wild turkey gobbled from the trees by the river.   Then we heard a mourning dove, and then a calf bawled from the nearest neighbor's, a half-mile away.  The sound carried across the still air as loudly as if the baby had been calling from our own barn.  We started counting the sounds....owl, turkey, dove, calf... frogs drumming out their croaking tones; insects and numerous unnamed birds cheeping, chirping, flapping and calling...a horse banging the feed bunk with its heavy hoof, the wind tickling the trees  Audrey mentioned that she had heard quail earlier in the day, and then there was a meadowlark and then the wren who is nesting in my little bird box and who warbles and dances around the yard at all hours of the day.   

I was thinking about the sounds and began to notice colors --- three deer grazing the tender corn plants across the road, their coats shining golden in the setting sunlight.  Red strawberries peeking from under dark green leaves.  Green pasture grass, green soybeans, green elms and mulberry trees --- all green but none of them the same color. And many different browns--soil, bark, mulch, rust. Bright and muted colors in flowers and sky.  Dots of white in the pasture where the bindweed blooms, dots of white on the window where a bit of rain had yet to evaporate.

This little bubble of space in Nowhere, Nebraska, is vibrant, but these hues and tones are not wrapped around dense humanity as they are in Atlanta.  Not at all like the colors and sounds on the mass transit, or in the foreign tongues and mysterious bright clothing that weaves and bobs outside a busy Atlanta BBQ joint. The difference between Rachel's immediate surroundings and mine is a pretty wide swath.

From my vantage point, the Georgia city and the Nebraska plain are both ripe with lovely and intriguing aspects that, in a Venn diagram, have very little overlap.   But I suppose that if you compared them with a place like المملكة العربية السعودية, located in Saudi Arabia or some other hinder part of the world, her home and mine might begin to look quite similar.  Attitude is everything.