Now there is
a word you do not hear every day (pronounced lat-ee-fun-dee-um) and
it means a large country estate. To be
very honest, until it popped up in my Word of the Day calendar yesterday I had
never heard of it but I will enjoy rolling that one out of my mouth when I
invite my friends to my latifundium.
Many city people have the dream of
retiring into the countryside but over the last few decades country living has
now become more expensive than city living.
Whenever something becomes fashionable the price seems to skyrocket and
in the case of country living the trend has been towards acreages with a very
large house. In the olden days a dilapidated
farm house was the plan, something to be fixed up and become the retirement
hobby; a Green Acres if you will.
Country living today is not cheap;
grocery store prices are as much as 50% higher than city prices and the smaller
the town the less competition there is.
As well, there are fewer alternate stores such as hardware stores,
clothing stores, drug stores, etc. In
some towns there aren’t any of these shops at all, only a “convenience store”. Interestingly enough even in these tiny
villages there manages to be a liquor store which can only mean that this is
always a store that can survive a small population. Entertainment is limited to hockey, curling
and school plays. I’m not quite sure
what the entertainment is in the summertime because there is nothing in town.
Now you are asking “so what is the appeal
of country living”? Entertainment doesn’t
have to be organized within buildings (i.e. movies, clubs, etc.). Instead there is all the pleasure of the
outdoors, be it simply in sitting in wide open spaces, developing gardens,
virtual farming, or enjoying the peace and quiet of no traffic by road or air. When I am visiting over night in the city my
senses are always a little shocked by all the night noises that never, ever
recede. When you live in the city you
become accustomed to those sounds to the point of not even hearing them (I was
once a city dweller myself) but for someone who has lived for more than 30
years in the country it is really distracting.
What wakes me on a summer morning is the sound of birds tweeting and
sometimes I will hear birds hopping on my roof.
Bliss.
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