More thoughts on a broken logjam

I'm waiting for laundry to finish and it's past midnight but I've been having further thoughts about the work/blogging/everything else doldrums we've been in lately, and why the logjam seems to have broken.

I'm not precisely a country boy -- Joplin was (and is) a town of 40,000 people -- but I grew up in the Ozarks and was always used to getting outside of an urban environment pretty often. We've tried since our marriage to do the same, getting out to the Shenandoah Valley or the Blue Ridge, traveling in the small-town South or Midwest, keeping it pretty down home.

Now I look back over the last six months or so. Our vacation: Hampton Roads, the biggest urban concentration in Virginia (Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News, Hampton, Chesapeake, Portsmouth -- all cities). Thanksgiving: Philadelphia, a city bigger and grittier than Washington. Christmas day trip: Baltimore. Great town, great food, but a city the size of Washington. In between: Washington.

I don't think we've been in the Valley since last summer sometime. Maybe we had one or two excursions to Solomon's Island in between, but that's about it. The latest issue of Blue and Grey magazine just arrived and is about Fisher's Hill ("the Gibraltar of the Shenandoah") and made me even more nostalgic for the Valley. My known ancestors who lived in the Valley left around the time of the Revolution, but I keep going back.

You can take the boy out of the hills but you can't take the hills out of the boy. I need country now and again. I think Tam and I both, and maybe even Sarah, have all been suffering from country deprivation. Today was brief and late starting, but it was outdoors, open, involved a certain amount of fresh air, honking geese, and manure, and there were moments when nobody else was in sight. We watched flocks of geese migrating overhead at Washington's birthplace today, stepped in sheep doo-doo (Sarah's term), and looked some turkeys in the eye. May even have seen an eagle nest, though we weren't sure till we blew the picture up on the computer.

As spring comes, I'm going to push hard for more country. It's a tonic.