The beauty of country living

There's nowhere I would rather be than Slower Lower Delaware.

When I look out the front window by the rocking chair from which I write most of my words I see my front lawn, the intersection of two roads, and two fields full of some combination of foodstuffs - this year it’s corn/corn, but last year it was soybeans/corn, and I think the first fall we were here the right-hand field was a watermelon field that had just been harvested - speaking of which, in a few weeks we’ll be seeing the melon busses driving around from the processing plant down the road a piece from me. (For those not in the know, picture a school bus with the top part behind the driver chopped off to the window bottoms, full of watermelons.) Behind all that in my perspective is a chicken farm with a few barns of the 58 or so I counted within a one-mile radius when I looked at Google Maps one time. It’s no big deal for me to have “fresh country air” that “smells like Delaware” or a tractor drive by the house and maybe this summer we’ll get another Sunday morning visit from the little yellow cropduster plane taking care of an adjacent field. (I saw him out already yesterday morning, so it’s that time of year.) Many summer nights we’re treated to the rhythmic sound of the irrigation systems as they make their slow rounds of the fields around my house. (I call them “country carwashes” because their radius often includes the highways and byways we drive along.)

Some may think that’s really boring, and I don’t blame them because there was a time I felt the same way: when I was 11 my family moved from a medium-sized semi-suburban house deep within South Toledo to a trailer in a rural trailer park, which was the four-month prelude to our brand new home on five rural acres maybe a mile away. Just months later it had a pond suitable for fishing and swimming, and a dirt pile I loved to build roads on for a year or two. Once we moved into our home, our sunset was over a series of cornfields stretching west to the horizon.

But I went from walking to school as a sixth-grader (the “boss” class of the elementary school) and being a safety guard to being just another stop on the middle- and high-school bus route at 7:10 in the morning. (Sixth grade was almost at the bottom of that totem pole.) I went from playing ball at the Rec Center in Maumee nearby where the Mud Hens used to play to the next year playing in several small hamlets dotting Northwest Ohio: Berkey, Metamora, Assumption, and Lyons. The sandlot games I would play in with a group of neighborhood boys at Heatherdowns Park became games between my brothers and I - we had the space to lay out a regulation field and built our own pitcher’s mound. We just had to watch those long foul balls to left field - splash!

For the first few years, if we weren’t playing baseball, the summers for my brothers and I were spent swimming and fishing in the pond, and shooting baskets at the hoop that we brought over from the old house. But over time as we got older, the magic of being a country boy disappeared and living out in the “far unlit unknown” became boring for a kid raised in subdivisions. (A little Rush - the band, not the late pundit - reference there.) By the time I got deep into high school, I wanted to hang out anywhere but the sticks so I would ride my bike 5 miles into Swanton to see what I could see or, once in awhile, cruise with friends to one of the local Toledo malls (usually Southwyck, which as of about 13 years ago became a pile of rubble. It was less than a decade old when we went there.)

Over the years since, I have lived in small towns, several places in the city of Toledo, and various spots in and around Salisbury. But what my wife and I came to long for was a home out in the country - after all, the reason I came here was because it reminded me a lot of Northwest Ohio, much more so than other places I could have worked like Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Jacksonville. She had one when we first met, but circumstances got in the way of her keeping it. It was a lot of work for both of us to get back to where we could own a home again.

I’m not going to say it’s the perfect place to live in terms of modern conveniences, particularly as we impatiently wait for the state-promised broadband internet to arrive, but the attitude of people out here more than makes up for that. We don’t mind small-town events like the Independence Day celebration in Laurel (that we haven’t actually been to yet because it was a casualty of the pandemic) or the Sharptown Carnival - they remind me of going to the Pemberville Free Fair at my grandparents’ house when I was a kid, the Fulton County Fair as a teenager who liked the day off school, or various small-town festivals popular all over the country. (Back in Ohio where I’m from, I think it’s a law that every town worth its salt has a festival: I can see the obvious need for a Swanton Corn Festival but there are nowhere near as many chicken farms around Delta, Ohio as there are here - yet they still have a Chicken Festival every July.)

The thing about country living these days, particularly as opposed to when I was a kid, is that our technology has advanced more than enough to get by. When we first moved out to our new house back in 1976, we still had a party-line telephone. I think it was an eight-party line at one time, but when we got there it was four, then two, and maybe about the start of 1978 we finally had a private line. Now I have a cell phone with a Maryland area code but live in Delaware without a land line. (Haven’t had one in over ten years.)

Back in the old house, we got whatever channels were available from Toledo or Detroit, which fortunately for us didn’t really require much adjustment of the aerial antenna. Now I have a satellite dish that came with the house that has many more channels than I need or want. Moreover, I don’t necessarily have to drive to Walmart because they now deliver to our door, same goes for Doordash and Amazon. When I was a kid we thought it was a huge deal when they got the McDonalds on the edge of Swanton, yet we still had to drive there.

Even so, country living retains its charm because, to me, it’s exciting living amidst a business operation. One family farm owns most of the acreage around us; in fact, they were the ones who subdivided the thirteen lots I live amidst, with eleven of them now built up. They probably subdivided 25 or 30 total lots of frontage up and down our country road that maybe cost them 20 acres of land out of a thousand or more but those lot sales perhaps got them through a season or two where the pickins’ were slim. A lot like mine would probably go for $50,000 now, and that’s quite a bit of corn - definitely more value than the 130 or so bushels otherwise grown on it might bring in.

One thing people around here worry about, though, is that everyone else is going to follow them here and make the country into the city. You can see that on the beach side of Sussex County, where traversing Routes 1, 9, 24, and 26 is a hassle and the back roads aren’t much more of a bargain anymore. If you imagined U.S. 113 as the line bisecting the county from north to south, I would hazard a guess that 2/3 of the people of Sussex live on the 1/3 of the land area east of Dupont Highway, and the density increases the closer you get to the beach. Essentially, the shoreline from South Bethany to Lewes is one long strip of development, and it used to stop right around Coastal Highway (Route 1.) Now it’s pretty solid for miles inland, thanks in part to a home builder I used to work for creating development after development. Farmers sold out and retirees from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania sold their $700k houses there to buy a $400k house here and pocket the difference, living well because there’s no sales tax and our property taxes are ridiculously low compared to where they’re from.

It sounds ominous, but I’ve always had a theory that if an area doesn’t grow, it will die. (Maybe that’s in part from the job that pays my bills.) We still have some room out here so I’m not too worried about the effects if the farmer sells those last two lots because I’m sure it’s still more profitable for the family to use the overall base of land for agriculture. I know not everyone will agree with me, but I think we’ll still be a rural area for a little while yet and remain befitting of the moniker “slower lower Delaware.”

Besides, my wife doesn’t like heat so Florida is out.