"Haven"

A walk in the woods

Sometimes country living just means taking a walk or enjoying a little green space.

Leaving one's inside quarters to experience blue skies, fresh air and the growing things that are determined to thrive anywhere can be plenty, depending upon how one looks at it.

I feel I live in a haven (rural Wisconsin), but it's easy to see that everyone everywhere experiences haven.

I think of  my mother-in-law in her neighborhood in Santa Ana, California. Santa Ana is like any American town--divvied up into sections, some more "desirable" than others, depending on who is doing the considering. It has a richness in cultural diversity and particularly so in the Hispanic population.

One might observe that my mother-in-law's neighborhood never held a gated community status, but she was up every morning with the birds, tending her shrubs and flowers so artfully established by my father-in-law in the early years of their marriage.

How fresh and inviting her haven always felt. With benches and chairs amidst the multi-layering of vivid colors in plant life, her yard was so inviting I remember that friends often drifted in to while away a few moments of their day. Her sense of belonging to a neighborhood that thrummed with vibrancy in sight and sound held great appeal; although that district definitely had issues, I never heard her note any of it with adjectives like "noisy," "congested," or "dangerous."

For the most part, people who live in an urban environment do so by choice, and wouldn't have it any other way. For the flavor of nature, a walk to a local part or a back-yard oasis makes it all good.

For ourselves, we went the extra mile (actually two thousand miles) to create our backyard oasis. Our neighbors, most of whom were born and raised here, are of true rural stock. They raise chickens, milk cows, go hunting and fishing, and grow gardens and hundreds of acres of crops. We take walks, ride bike (my husband), go antiquing (me), watch old (and new) movies, tend the grandbabies, and sit on the porch with lemonade and magazines.

Hmmm....come to think of it, we live like more like city people than rural folk. But as any person envisions their idyllic surroundings, we dreamed this and count our blessings that it's come to pass.

It's not that we haven't tried to extract more from the land. We have lived "country" for most of our married years, here and in Colorado. We have raised chickens for eggs, tapped trees and made maple syrup, picked our wild fruits to make delicious jams, gathered morel mushrooms to enjoy with our steaks (homegrown by friends who raised the cattle) and grew gardens to can extensively.

It was all rewarding, and it was all work. Now don't get me wrong--we're not afraid of hard work. We don't lead sedentary lives and it's hard for either one of us to sit unproductively for long, at least during the daylight hours. It's not usually until night falls that watching a movie even feels right, although the hour approaching dusk often finds us with the magazines on the porch.  And well that should be.

We have learned as many do, that when enthusiasm for any project runs its course, DO THE MATH. Most self-accomplished endeavors pay both monetarily and spiritually. When they cease to do both, it's time to pick another venture.

How then DO we extract from the land that feeling that we are living a country life?

As anyone does. We look at what we have as precious, and we nurture and tend it.  In Garden Grove (also in California) my mother grew a spectacular bougainvillaea shrub along one side of her house. Out back, my dad grew tomatoes, chilies, lemons and nopales (cactus paddles).

From his own imagination, he dismantled an old wood cookstove and built a stone framework to reposition its various sections into a beautiful outdoor barbeque unit. One side boasted an uprising, stone-encased grilling rack complete with chimney stack, and the rest of it was stove--four burners with a utility/spice shelf above and a warming oven below. In readiness for this unit, Dad poured a concrete floor, set down a long picnic table and a permanent canopy overhead. He added a refrigerator nearby, stocked it well, and waited for the family gatherings.

With a garden-like backyard and all of that going on, I like to think this haven in the late 60's and early 70's was an early outdoor kitchen and that my dad was a man ahead of his time.

My grandma Rosa (Dad's mother) also created her piece of paradise in Placentia, once more in California. Her small acreage harbored many kinds of fruits and florals, but it is the likes of her geraniums that I have yet to see again in my lifetime. Grandma trained and nurtured her red geraniums so that they flourished skyward on both sides of the fence.

Both sides of the fence belonged to Grandma, because her little namesake restaurant was next-door. The eatery bragged an outdoor patio with a stone floor, my dad's work again. The fabulous geraniums and other flora lushed the setting into a tropic-kissed haven for diners. Such a haven it was that although small, I couldn't think of a prettier place to hold our wedding reception in 1973.

Grandma too was ahead of her time. She created an appealing outdoor eatery with European-like flavor (which was in actuality reflective of her own Mexican heritage) in the 1960's, and I think now that no bistro I've ever seen has held a candle to it. It was a haven for many people, including herself.

I have to say that our haven in Wisconsin bespeaks almost purely of God's handiwork. Yes, we "tweak" it all the time. This involves alot of detail and many hours of tweaking at that.

But it was presented to us as a generous piece of natural land, and as you know, nothing is prettier than what God creates as nature. Keeping with its flow can't be a bad thing. If we don't use the land by planting it, raising animals on it and so on, we can still feel we are living a country life in the simplicity of just ENJOYING IT.

With this thinking we (my husband) scoped the place to expand on its natural flow in trails. For country-living pleasure we (this means we) take walks, many of them. We breathe fresh air and see wildflowers and wildlife, we get exercise and always come away with never-failing gratitude, even awe.

Less in land would be plenty I'm sure, but more is what came with when we found this place. About this we've always felt that the place more likely found us, and maybe it is because it knew (God knew) that from it we would create HAVEN. Here on earth, that's pretty close to HEAVEN.

Lemonade!!!