There's a lot of people who listen to country music. There's a lot of people who wear flannel, hang big flags off their trucks and have those hunting decals on everything they drive and wear. But the truth is, there's not that many true country gals (or guys). Cowboy boots don't make the man. Or the gal. You can pay a lot of money to look like that, but what makes it true is way down deep in the soul.
I grew up in a subdivision, but at the end of it (or the start of it, whichever direction you decided to come from), we had fields beside and behind us, so us kids lived one part of our lives out in the street in front, riding our bikes, playing ball and in mud puddles with our neighbors. The other part was lived out in some sort of other dimension, quiet and serene. Fishing in the pond, stealing rides on horses in the pasture next door, catching tadpoles and sneaking them into our aquarium (where they hatched into frogs and Mama found them all over the house)... laying in the long grass in the fields with the sun on our faces, baby calves all around, lazily dreaming about the clouds above and all the things that life was starting to crack open. Blackberries growing along the fencelines, warm and bittersweet on our tongues. Muscadines bursting from their skins (just a taste of one now takes me back quicker than anything). Many warm, drowzy afternoons spent in solitude out in those meadows made me think, dream, center.
Apart from a love of all things natural and country, there is a work ethic of a true country gal that goes so much deeper, born of days doing all the things that nobody wants to do: sweating at real work -- lifting, digging, moving. No pretty clothes involved. Scraping, stinking, dealing with refuse produced by animals (poop) and way more . No pink camo allowed, at least no clean pink camo. My sister and I spent days helping Daddy do all manner of work or just hauling along with him at whatever he happened to be doing. There were no real fancy devotions or lessons, just life lived in a real way. Prayers were spoken out loud and often. God was trusted. Money was tight, meals were simple and good, and honorable behavior and superior grades were expected.
We were lucky. We weren't sophisticated and it didn't really matter, in the end. I saw over time how tragic or silly some of those sophisticated people ended up. And if not, hey, hurrah for them. Meanwhile, I had a wonderful childhood and a foundation to live the rest of my life on.
So, bring it on up to now.... thinking on a plucky girl that we raised (along with three big brothers) out in the country. I thought of a job she and I were working on in recent years...a large painting job in a vacant house. We needed a dishwasher and the owners told me they'd be happy for us to take their old one off their hands. It was clean and rarely used, so my daughter and I began taking it out to put in my work van. We pulled it out too fast, not noticing the really short connection to the water line. Next thing we know, there was fluid spurting all over the kitchen. While I ran to find the keys to open the laundry room to find the tool to shut off the water at the street (much screaming and running about), said spirited daughter runs around the house to the miniscule space under the house, tosses the door off its pegs, and proceeds to dive in and army-crawl her way across 20+ feet to the area below the kitchen sink. It was 20+ feet of thick spiderwebs and whatever spun those things. I could hear her yelling all the way to the road. Most women would have turned back and squealed. No. She dove in and yelled. I couldn't get the water turned off at the street before she had already disabled it under the floor. She squirmed back out, spitting and slapping at all manner of creatures that had gotten attached to her during that melee. She yelled some more and then grinned. Now that's a country girl. She's near six foot tall, beautiful as a Greek goddess, smart as a whip and loves God like there's no tomorrow. No wonder there's no fella come by who's fit to fight for her. And I'm not even mentioning those three brothers and big Daddy he'd have to get through.
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