Let's keep it a secret
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
"Do you have a sauna in town?" asked my friend Nel when she heard that I'd had surgery last winter. "A sauna is one of the best things to promote healing — the heat you know."
"A sauna in Ramona?" I laughed. "We'll have to wait for the 4th of July in Kansas, living in a house without air conditioning — well, that's the closest thing to a sauna that I know about within 50 miles. And, we don't have to pour water on rocks to get ourselves a little humidity." After I got off the phone, I chuckled at my friends asking about health clubs in Ramona, the way I'd inquire if there was a grocery store. "A resort, this isn't," I said to myself and then stopped!
Wrong! Ramona is a resort! Now, don't laugh. While it may be the last resort for someone searching for low rent, it wasn't ours. Ramona was our resort of choice, our little getaway, our vacation choice, removed from California freeways and health spas. Our spa, at that time, was house remodeling in Kansas in August. We stretched, we reached, we sweated, suffered, wore ourselves to a happy frazzle, and could definitely feel the burn. When we were done with our workout, we weren't just panting from the exertion — the house was painted!
I like that about Kansas country. If you're lifting iron, you're probably fixing a piece of farm equipment. If you're doing step aerobics, you're cleaning house. And if you walk more than mile, the cows got out and you're fixing fence. Our workouts concentrate on work.
Last night, I stopped for a minute and sat down on the front porch in the dark. The air was balmy without a trickle of wind. "Is something wrong?" asked Tool Time Tim as he walked by with a piece of trim he'd just cut for our new dining room door. "I'm okay," I answered, "I'm just savoring this weather, it feels like California."
"I told you," he countered, "California's got nothing on us." I'd heard this before. Fifteen years ago, we tracked down the KP&L truck in town and asked him to connect our electricity — it was just that simple then. "Where you from?" he wanted to know. And when I told him, he said, "You know, our winters are not that different from northern California. We're a well-kept secret, here in Kansas — if all those Californians knew about us, there'd be a mass migration." We chuckled at the thought.
"Is it happening?" I wondered, as I sat on the porch last night. For sure, we migrated and so did some others down the street.
"See that house there," said Triple T on Sunday as we drove through the edges of the Flint Hills, "That's a lady and her daughter who moved here from California, too." I had to admit the countryside was beautiful outside Chapman and that areas looked like the Napa Valley used to look before it was overtaken by vineyards — pastoral landscapes, rolling hills, new spacious houses, ranches geared more for pleasure than survival.
"I'm in Petaluma sitting at this little coffee sShop that you'd just love," my daughter said the other night on the phone, "So I thought I'd call Kansas and share the experience."
"What a California thing, to be sitting at a coffee shop, talking on a cell phone," I thought as I listened to news of a fencing competition where she'd just placed third — and we're not talking fixing fences, either.
She was right, I do miss quaint little places with sidewalk tables, bookstores down the block. and the farmer's market every Friday. But, hey, in Kansas, we've got farmers! All in all, I like the country pretty much the way it is and I'll take it above city life any day of the week. While I love to see a certain amount of progress, a few new faces, some improvements; there's a piece of me that likes things just the way they are! I love knowing everyone in town. I love the quiet, the long spaces between farms, and the straight country roads with very little traffic.
It's another day in the country and just between you and me, let's keep this lovely weather a secret. And I'm just going to have to stop making country life seem quite so idyllic when I write this column or we're going to have us a mass migration on our hands.
