City Life
I live in a small town. And you would think it quiet. But it’s not. A major highway runs through my town. It is nearby. About 325 feet at its closest point. And we live between two major cities and places where those people want to go. Their tires and big trucks make a lot of noise. It’s mostly quiet at night, but it starts to hum at first light. One upshot, and this is something of a positive, is the bird song is loud because they have to compete with the cars, and we have plenty of birds.
The noise pollution is one thing, however, because we’re right on the edge of the zone where medicine thinks it might be a bad place to live because, too many pollutants. Fortunately, the prevailing wind blows from my house to the road. So, I guess it would be worse luck to live on the north side of the highway. But I don’t really know how to go about getting my air quality tested, and besides I’m at the age where the number of things that could easily kill me are rapidly increasing.
I wish we’d thought a bit more about our location when we built sixteen years ago. But we were just happy to be here. And we are close to open country and a big park. And the road makes it easy to go places, And this is family land and our family’s town. And we have trees and birds and flowers. So, there are lots of positives. And at night I can still walk outside and see the big dipper and the milky way and that feels like a good thing, too. Plus, I’m close enough where I can walk to the cemetery where my wife is buried.