Meditations on the Northern Panhandle

The neglected country roads, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and all in varying stages of disrepair--like this one, scarred, and re-tarred, and scabbed with potholes.  The vast green pastures that descend down from the rounded hillsides almost like elegant parkland.  The tall trees still just barely touched with the colors of the fall.  Summer is past, but not as far past down there as it is up here in Pittsburgh.  The cattle gathering by a stream in the golden autumn light.  The little white churches on hilltops surrounded by eroded memorials to the dead.  It's a charming place, and I've even looked at the price of land down there.  It's not my place, I know, and I'd never fit in with all the Trump chumps.  But I'm glad to know it's there.  I'm glad to know that I can always jump in the car and be there in less than an hour.  Besides, there's not much acreage for sale till you get as far south as Wetzel County, below the Mason Dixon.  I'd like to own some cheap, wooded land and try my hand at cob architecture.

There comes a time when you must grieve the lives you never got to live.  It's not that you're unhappy with the one you did get, only that you wonder what other things might have been.