Ah wilderbliss!
I’ve mentioned that I’d love to live in a loft downtown. The flip side of that is I could also be quite happy in the middle of butt-friggin’ nowhere in what I call Cowboy Space.
Cowboy Space is my name for places like Montana or Wyoming. Why I might call it that is probably not too hard to guess; the American West is pretty much synonymous with cowboys and the wide open space that this country is famous for. That it might hold any place in my idealized future, however, might come as a surprise to most of the people who know me.
Maybe it’s a desire fueled by the tales my aunt, uncle and cousins shared about their summer adventures “out west;” the camping trip through our nation’s national parks that I took as a teenager; or, my friend JB’s memories of growing up in Montana. Maybe I read The Little House on the Prarie series at an impressionable age.
Whatever it is, it’s there, firmly planted, a secret wish that not many people would guess. And it’s true, I am a city girl. But, as much as I love people watching, late nights out and all the hustle bustle craziness that goes with the biggest and loudest of them, there’s a part of me that could be quite happy spending a good chunk of time isolated in a big house in the middle of nowhere. I’d bake and nap and watch old movies, drive my vintage pickup out to some local dive for dinner, then come home and go to sleep early. Maybe there’d be a chicken or two for some fresh eggs, certainly a couple of big dogs, maybe a cow, and a horse would put me over the moon, but mostly there’d be a lot of just lying around and watching the sky and enjoying the quiet.
Visitors welcome. Bring libations.
Image: Matthew Camman, via his Flickr, with a Creative Commons License, some rights reserved.