I love this old wellhouse, on a nearby farm, and photograph it whenever I can, on this beautiful day, against this roiling and emotional sky. This photograph is my love letter, my poem,  to rural life, my postcard, my message.

I need to say I love you.

I love the freedom you offer to give rebirth to life, your glorious history of freedom

and individuality.

I love the freedom to life my own life in peace and privacy. And the smell of the hard and individual  work

that comes right out of the ground.

I love the beautiful things I look at every day, the sky I can see in the daytime,

the stars at night.

The long drives on winding roads framed by beautiful hills.

I love the real world of life,  the natural world,  the real world

of real animals. We do not live in a no-kill world here, no elegaic paradise. It is dirty

and stinky and poor and heart-achingly beautiful.

I love the smell of family and faith.

It is, in many ways, a forgotten place. Washington is so far from here.

Economists and politicians do not believe rural life is efficient anymore,

or that farmers should keep their farms, or people should keep their  jobs and schools and libraries,

closing and struggling and fading under the weight of a political and economic system that has declared them

irrelevant in the global and corporate economy, and abandoned them.

So the places I drive by, the photos I take, the people I see  are all dramatic and emotional to me,

and touch my heart.

I am not the only one who loves you and I believe your time has come

again. When people are  thinking of their neighbors and communities, and hoping to save them,

and wishing to know where their food comes from, and how it was grown and raised

and treated.

There are refugees from here, people driven out of their lives, families torn apart, traditions shattered.

But I can hear the sounds of them changing, of them  tiring of giant corporations shaping life, and of bad jobs in big cities where trapped people  hate their work and struggle to make the money to shop at Wal-Mart for groceries and clothes their neighbors used to make.

When  I drive by, I can feel the farms stirring, and the old barns calling out in witness to wake up, wake up. They are waiting for the farms and farmers to  rise up again, and tell people  what they grow, and how they grew it, and what they slaughter, and how they cared for it. And I believe that is coming.  There is no anger in this for me, no argument, just a stirring. It seems inevitable to me, and I can feel it when I drive by these old buildings and barns.

I thank you for the wonderful life I have here. Hang on.  Much love to you.

Your time is coming again.