She is in the heartbeat you hear around you, listen

I love the country so much - so much. I did not realize just how much until I no longer had it. There are many people I talk to here that don't get it, this yearning I have.

"It's so lonely in the country, nothing around. You have to drive so far to DO anything. How boring."

So, I try to describe it for them. They don't see that it's NOT lonely, that it's enchanting and warm, even in the chill gray of winter. They don't see that life sparkles in the country and tickles within, stirring as the city can not. The earth hums in the country. It sings with the changes, a new song every season, a cyclic symphony. Soft windchimes tinkling in the spring breeze, trilling crickets on hot summer evenings, honks of geese flying south in the crisp autumn sky, and the crackle of wood burning in the fireplace on a cold winter's night.

They think I'm crazy and laugh. They do not know. They don't miss what they've never had. Here in this city, the earth is silent, subdued. She's covered up to the point where all that can be heard is her inner rumblings of discontent. Occasionally, if you go far enough away from the noise and press of people, you can hear her gurgling, trying to be heard above the roar. She is waiting for someone to listen.

"Why go there?" they ask me shaking their heads, "It's only a dried up riverbed."

"It's a pulse" , I say. "An artery that leads to her heart."

It's a connection, and here I hold her hand, rubbing my thumb along her wrist. They do not understand yet for they have not heard her cadence.

Maybe if I would have listened,

To something else besides the birds,
or the wind in the trees,
the cars zooming by on the streets,
the squeaky spring in the couch,
the tick of the clock,
the bass of the stereo upstairs,
the thunder of the storm on the horizon,
the bed hitting the wall across the hall,
the tapping of her fingers on the counter,
the heavy sigh she gives nightly after work,
the words coming in scratchy on the radio,
the mouse living in the wall,
or the leaky faucet,

I would have heard what she wasn't saying.