over the valley
My buddy Ken invited us out to his family’s farm last night for “boys night out”… (read as leave your wives at home)… Gender bending aside – I was the only one who had spouses who qualified to come to the gathering.
I met Ken during my first and only year of college away from St. Louis at a tiny white-bread liberal arts institution called “Westminster College” in Fulton, Missouri. Hailing from Little Rock, but with the majority of his family being from St. Louis, Ken’s familial worth most would find staggering.
I can only guess that spending his formative years in Arkansas made him replace the silver spoon in his mouth with a corn cob. The guy is completely down to earth and possesses a work ethic and desire,.. no,… scratch that… JOY in getting his hands dirty that you’d never assume that he was a member of one of St. Louis’ old-money dynasties.
He became an unlikely, but cherished friend… and a fun dorm neighbor. He would regularly bang on the wall and tell me to turn down my house music… I would regularly edit his English papers. To this day – Ken credits me for teaching him how to write and how to diagram and identify the major parts of the vagina.
The “farm” consisted of a vast stretch of land with a nearing 200 year-old ancestral cabin which was moved by his family from Kentucky a century ago to it’s present site. You don’t have to be related to feel the history of the place resonate.
The valley below contains pastures and stables for a cousin’s horse collection and a good sized home occupied by the care-taking family who lives on-property. The cabin, which after additions in the early-mid 20th Century, now sleeps 12. It is shared / owned by “all” of the family. Everyone pitches in with a yearly fund and one cousin maintains a website so family members can reserve the cabin without getting into schedule conflicts.
We arrived by 8pm and were greeted by the guys at the pool: Ken’s neighbor, Bob, a bearish, banjo playing 50-something… Rob, computer genius / geek and Ken’s old work colleague and Dan, Ken’s wife’s friend’s boyfriend and aging, tattooed, Gen-X “Extreme Sports” guy.. and us.. the three hairy homos. An odd mix – but it worked.
Dusk was magic. We stood in the pool and watched a thunderstorm rage in the distance while fireflies ignighted the valley below us.
Everyone pooped out by midnight. A stark contrast to the bashes I remember ten years ago when the invariable drunk guests would puke in the woods, girls would loose their bikini tops, couples would have sex on the trampoline and I would find myself talking to Ken’s sister till dawn.
Nonetheless – it was one of those evenings where you pause for a second and notice that you feel so alive that you wonder what the hell is it you feel the rest of the time.
Not blog worthy at all.