This past weekend, while visiting with the Accountant’s family out of state, we got a taste of the country. My brother in law and his girlfriend are buying a house in a very rural area, and we went to see the place.

Long winding roads led us there, passing the occasional house or small farm. At their new home, it was quiet. The kind of quiet that just doesn’t exist in the city. You could almost hear the air. The only sound was the chirping of birds and insects. It was another world. From the front porch of the house, the view is of a sizable cornfield with a creek just beyond and a great mountain for a backdrop. Behind the house, woods. This is a neighborhood where fishing and hunting and farming are the norm -  where it isn’t unusual for a bear to wander through your yard.

We went out too to his girlfriend’s family’s farm, a stretch of land that seemed almost unreal to me. It was pretty awe-inspiring to look out over the rolling fields with mountains beyond, to see the tractors and silos and the green, green, green. In the house, hunting trophies as big as my body – and I’m not talking gold and silver cups, these trophies were heads with open eyes and enormous horns and antlers, shaggy fur and teeth. I couldn’t fully enter the room. When I looked up and saw them there my mouth dropped, and “Oh my god” came out. I have no control over my response to mounted animal heads, it just comes. They thoroughly disturb me.

It’s an incredible thing to walk into a completely different way of life, in particular when you know the people living it. Standing outside the house looking at the vast openness in the sunlight, I wasn’t quite sure how it made me feel.

It is always amazing to witness nature on a grand scale. Whether it was when I visited Scotland and looked down on the hills and the mist, or when the Accountant and I saw Niagara Falls – it hits you and fills you up inside. But here in the countryside of the U.S., looking over the farm… I guess on one hand I was just appreciating the remarkable beauty of it, and I think any city dweller will feel a twinge of desire when faced with the beautiful quiet and calm of the country (even if you know there’s no way you could really live there). I couldn’t help but picture our children running and playing in the fields (as they no doubt will one day when we visit with their uncle), but I was also feeling the political and social realities that come with this way of life, in such a conservative environment. Sure, you could live almost in blissful isolation with your little family on your big piece of land, growing vegetables and playing in the yard, picking wildflowers for the dinner table, but eventually you have to go into town. To school, to work…  Now, I am used to being in the minority.  I am gay and, as I often joke, if my political beliefs were any further to the left, I’d be a socialist.  But to live in this world, it seems to me that we would be more than in the minority; we would be alone.  Maybe the flood of emotion I was feeling was just the sense of being acutely different.

I was feeling and thinking all of these things knowing full well that I don’t even want to live on a farm. I’m not really an outdoorsy gal. I have an appreciation of nature, sure – but the country life isn’t for me. I like my Starbucks and DSW, walks in the city and shopping malls. I like living in the bluest of the blue states. I like the diversity. I like living in a place where we have rights.

I didn’t expect our visit into the rural world to be so thought provoking or emotional.  But it was nice, and I’m glad we got to go.  We have an open invitation to go back for a visit and help with the yard work once my brother in law and his girlfriend are moved in, which we look forward to. One thing I know for sure – we can visit the country, but we ain’t stayin’!