If it’s Thursday, perhaps this is Cape Cod again. My zip code displacement is getting to me. I just returned from a nine-day house-hunting trip to San Antonio. All houses, all of the time; houses that looked like they grew on runners, for each row popped up identical buildings, side by side, row on row- to say I found that a tad depressing is an understatement.
Not that they weren’t beautiful houses; they were, immaculate houses, perfectly perfect houses, mostly under 10 yrs old. For that matter that was part of the problem, it was hard to imagine my less-than-perfect possessions blending well with these pristine surroundings. On top of that, I hardly ever choose a house for the house itself but more for the view out the window. And here, the view was of the next cloned house. Finally, I put “mature trees” into the search and that helped a little. But the more mature trees I looked for, the further I kept getting from the area my husband is working in.
Then I got greedy, and started saying I wasn’t looking for ¼ acre lots, but rather 1 acre. That dropped a few thousand houses out of the market just like that. It was the best thing I ever did, and now houses in the Texas “Hill Country” popped into view. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law live there and they always said it was the only place to look.
So now, with apologies to my poor husband who will have to consider slogging through traffic as bad as any we faced in DC, I have found a property or two with fabulous look-out-the-window appeal. One sits atop a hill with a view of Live Oak and Cedar’s as far as you can see.
And the other has a little over two acres of a myriad of plantings, which qualify it as a Certified Wildlife Habitat- very cool.
My first thought was that for the first few months I could simply blog about what I was discovering in my yard. Monarch’s were omnipresent here also, much closer to their destination in the Sierra Nevada’s than the Florida ones. This second house also boasts the largest tree I saw in TX and its right out my window! The house was also the only one I saw that looked lived in. It wasn’t perfectly perfect but homey, and much more me than any of the others. So now, dear reader, you must wait along with me to see which one will win the day. And then, what shall we call this blog? A “Blog from the Bog” was so lyrical. “The Nature of My Story”, “Living with Less Chlorophyll” – it will take some thought.
Meanwhile I promised some nature. The most stunning thing about the area is that wherever you are, in the inner circle of the city, or on the fringes, there are deer; dozens of deer, denizens of deer, dangerous amounts of deer. One strike against the house on top of the hill is that it requires my husband to navigate his way down the hill on roads that are the major hang out areas for deer with time on their hands. Add, that he will be traveling in the dark most days and we can see a collision course in his future. In a duel of “Large Buck vs. Aged Escort”, I would put my money on the buck.
Clearly something has gone very wrong with the food chain. I shall have to look into this, but one guess is that all those bounty-hunting days of the past have brought us the welfare state of deer we have in the present. Too many sweet fawns being born where there is little food, plus this historic drought isn’t helping either. Ironically, the house that purports to be a “Wildlife Habitat” has a high electric fence around it; one supposes to keep the wildlife out. At least the foraging herbivores that would nibble down all the protected plants.
Surely I will have a lot to learn. I have lived in New Mexico before and did love that. I will concentrate on embracing my “inner cowboy” my “inner lizard” and try not to think of what I will not see much of any more: amphibians, clouds, green grass, colored leaves, mushrooms, moss, oceans, marshes, ponds, cranberries floating in a flooded bog etc, etc. In reference to the title of this piece, I DID know what I had, and it won’t really be gone, but still existing 1,000’s of miles from where I will be.
But it will be all right. A naturalist, I tell everyone, is never bored. Let’s just see if I can live up to my own maxims. Of course, half the fun will be sharing it with all of you. But the house isn’t bought yet, so more weeks of slipping from NE to MD to TN and back again. Already there is another blog brewing about some Bufflehead antics that are taking place right out my window here in North Falmouth. This glorious set of windows overlooking the pond has the most glorious view of all. So stay tuned, “bog blogging” isn’t over yet.
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