I love living here

Since I was a very young boy I have seen myself retiring to a large tract of land. At seven years old we lived on 23 acres, which seemed like all the land in the world. When I was twelve we bought another 30 acres behind the original 23, to create a long tract of 50 acres. Again this was all the land in the world.

At 37 years old I bought this place. It's 2200 acres. At 48 years old I retired and moved here.   That boyhood dream came true.

It's surreal to see so few people during the week. I have one man who works here full time to help with general maintenance.  And yes, maintenance here is more than one full time person. I tried for about six months to do it by myself and it was exhausting while falling ever further behind. In the summer the grass grows. That requires cutting in the open areas and applying RoundUp along 12.5 miles of fence.

So outside of one hired hand, we have only one friend who visits.  She's very nice and like us, retired with the time to make the trip over to see us and participate in what we are doing.

On any given week we see the hired hand, our friend Donna, and usually one of the oilfield people. Outside of these it's got to be someone with a specific mission to come through the gate. Today it was Bubba from Delta Fuel bringing 2000 gallons of diesel for the spring and summer. And the truck driver bring rock for some road repair. Tuesday it was the driver from Sol's Pipe and Steel bringing a delivery of steel for various projects on the agenda.

And then there's Karen. She and I have some critical common cultural components. We are both first-born, intelligent, and driven. She grew up in an area with about the same "ruralness" as I did. She was closer to the smaller town of Covington while I was further from the larger town of Baton Rouge. While she never would have imagined herself living in a place like this with its severity of isolation, it's become her cherished way of life to live here and take loving care of me. Chalk one up for love conquering all.

Living with Karen is divine. She's supremely competent, beautiful, active, diligent, funny, and my over the top loving wife. She was made for me. I am incredibly lucky to have her.  Well, we are lucky to have each other.

How long will I love living here? Who knows.

Beyond any personal choice of staying here, I am very concerned about what is happening around the world and our national debt. The vast majority of  sovereign debt, theirs and ours, will never be repaid. The western world just does not produce that much. And the other financial obligations here including Medicare and Social Security you can just forget. There is absolutely no way future workers in this country, of all income levels, will ever be productive enough for the government to confiscate that much money from them during their working years.  You can forget all of those touchy feelings about social contracts and such. Contacts, written and otherwise, are worthless if either side can't fulfill. And to be frank, your children can't fulfill. And why should they? They didn't pocket anything in exchange for the debt we are leaving them. Okay, that's all for another blog posting later, but the point is that the world live in now around here might become a FSU (Former Soviet Union) style pot of crabs.   And I'd prefer that the nearest crabs are down the road at least.

So yes, I love living here.