The boys just drove off in the truck a bit ago.
I’m almost never left alone here. (Is being with 37 domestic fowl, 13 cats, two hogs, and a hound alone?) In the first twenty minutes, I fished out a handful of 9mm rounds and loaded them into my handgun. I went out to our makeshift driveway range and fired one just to make sure all was functional. It was loud, as I had I remembered it would be, but the neighbors here don’t mind.
Night will fall soon. The chore of dragging the dog to his kennel and closing up the coops will mark the official beginning of nighttime.
My loaded weapon is stashed. I am ready to pretend I live alone for a few nights. There’s fun in the “what if” of it, at least at first. Alone in such wild country. Left to dance to my own rhythms. Inevitably though, the weight of aloneness will become more unmanageable than the thrill of the make-believe, and I’ll get lonely. Such is the way of it. Headstrong as I am, I’m not made for solitary confinement.
There’s no dinner to make; laundry is humming inside the house. An owl across the gully is getting an early start. I hear the occasional car growl past on the old gravel road. A chorus of frogs is singing a soft, endless whistle-tone.
I don’t want this sunset to end, but it will. Very soon. Night will beat through the field and brush towards the porch and press against the windows. I’ll be submerged with held breath until morning, when the rooster starts thinking about his mash and starts screeching around the house even before the first wisps of dim light over the eastern hill.
more please