“Anybody can be good in the country.”
– Oscar Wilde

J. and I are visiting the new family pile back East for the holiday.  In order to fully comprehend Small Dog’s family, you must understand our one vital characteristic: we are chameleons.

We have had to be.  We have gone from a suburban Dutch commune just outside Brussels, to typhoon ravaged third world Pacific islands, and most places in between.  And we have generally taken to each of them like a duck to water learned, variously, to speak Dutch/French/German and go scuba diving and spear fishing with the best of them.  We can chop coconuts with machetes, hold our own at major social or political functions, and pack up and move to the other side of the world in weeks.  I was chucked into cotillion training and also went deer stalking with my dad (and have suffered the subsequent social multiple personality disorder more or less cheerfully).

But now, my family has (to use what I think must be the local term) “gone country.”

They have a gorgeous house and 40 acres of land in the backwoods of the Eastern US far away from anything.  The (I think I can be justified in calling it a) village is tiny, and much of it built in the previous century or so.  Spaced out along the country roads, sitting each on their individual plots of land, are colonial and Civil War era houses (sporadically punctuated with mobile homes and trailers).  But besides the pretty farms there is next to no development.

This place is loaded with character!  There are fantastic white, steepled churches built in the early 19th century and still in use, planted wherever there is a cluster of houses.  There a one or two large antebellum homes that have been turned into inns or B&Bs.  The people here are poor, but fabulously nice and friendly.  Life seems slower.  It probably is!  We’ve been traipsing around the world for the better part of thirty years, these people are born, raised, and die here.

It’s a completely foreign life to my parents.  My father, who has 40 acres of land to do with what he will, is as happy as a clam!  My dad was born in the wrong century, he was supposed to be a gentleman farmer only (as he said) then he couldn’t have had a chainsaw.  He has the opportunity to build his own estate from the ground up and is loving it.  He’s plating trees and shrubs, digging a pond, tramping through the river bottoms, chopping wood to giveaway to neighbors, and making messes to his heart’s content.

Mum is unused to the inconvenience of not living close to anything, but she loves her house and the area.  My siblings are still making up their minds, they went from being considered very clever in their schools in the UK to towering geniuses in the county school here, and sundry other changes that sort of throw them off.  The dog loves it.  She chases squirrels and digs after moles to her heart’s content.

Next time, a few character sketches from the area.