Hill Country Living
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
We’re in the midst of that cruel season of the year where the rest of the world decides it’s Fall with their Pumpkin Spice Lattes and dayglow orange mums, but the Southland is still swimming in watermelon, tomatoes, zucchini and white wine on ice. Fall is a farce here until much further on and I resent the mass marketing that makes me want to buy a cozy wool sweater when it’s 92 degrees outside.
Let’s face it, despite a nautical wool pea coat ad promising otherwise, I’ll never stand on the rocky shores of coastal Maine in costly knee-high rubber boots while eating a piping hot bowl of lobster chowder, leaning in against the salty incoming winds of the Atlantic. I’ll be barefoot in the mud at Enid amidst the dead-still layer of evaporated boat gas until at least early November.
But, we do have football! And we in the Southland arguably have that better than everyone else. So, this is a fair trade, I guess.
My youngest kid is finally old enough to go to Blue Devils football games without a grown up involved at all, and that is just a whole other level of parenting unlocked. If you had told me a few years ago that a day would eventually come when my children would say “I’m going to the game” on their way out the door and I would then have absolutely zero things to do to make that happen, I wouldn’t have believed it. Bike rides and car rides and ticket purchases and concession money and friend groups – they do it all. I feel weirdly retired.
Water Valley is a great town to live in when your kids are in true free-ranging age. There are only about four places they’re likely to be because there only about four places and you can almost see all of those places at once from, if not your porch, then at least the top of a hill somewhere. Water Valley caters really well to those that tend to wander between small, affordable conveniences.
That’s not all good, though. I think Water Valley’s reputation for unintentionally catering to the low-maintenance, self-reliant and casually nomadic set has reached the stray dog community. Did the president of stray dogs send out a memo for them all to come here? It’s like that time the town was suddenly seeing a mysterious influx of groundhogs. Except the stray dog situation is less adorable due to the potential for biting, starvation and/or rabies.
Y’all take care of your dogs. Get them fixed and walk them on a leash. Don’t let them out the back door to wander around town all day. It stresses me out to no end to have a rando dog trot along beside me on my walk each morning and then I’m suddenly in charge of making sure it doesn’t get hit by all the cars. Don’t put that responsibly on other folks in town. It’s rude.
If we aren’t careful we’re going to become Stray Dog Valley and that sounds much more dystopian than Water Valley which sounds refreshing. Let’s stay refreshing.
