What you don't think about

(Once again I find myself catching up. This blogging in a composition book is more work than I thought. Sorry for the dry spell...)

Morning in the country.

Thunderstorms last night. Cool and windy and sunny this morning, with puffy stretched-out clouds marching across the sky (they certainly aren't strolling). A farm house a mile or two off, brilliantly white as a patch of sun picks it out on the top of its hill. They've got a flagpole, and the flag is up. I can barely see it, but the wind has it straight out and dancing--it catches the eye even at this distance.

A train's passing by, not 50 feet away. At speed. I've lived in the city enough to forget how fast they go out in open country. And how scary they are at speed, close up.

I'm at a place that seems to manufacture compost and package it for big-store gardening departments. Nicer than a lot of factories, out here, field and woods all around. A pond for geese in the middle of the "plant." Not even a dock. They push a ramp up to your trailer and the forklift climbs it with the goods.

The fellow in the truck ahead of me (we're waiting in line) is new to the business. (Odd feeling, thinking of others as newbies...) Told the lady at the desk he was still getting used to the variety. "How much there is going on out here," was the way he put it. I hadn't really thought about that. How much of our commerce--and the things that make our lives what they are--we don't think about.

I've seen garden soil in WalMarts and Home Depots and the like. Part of the background. I've even taken a deep breath in the Garden Department, and enjoyed the aroma of fresh soil. But I never really thought about where they got it. And I never imagined a peat-moss/compost "factory" outside a small town in Illinois, with a line of trucks waiting for the rolling ramp and the forklift, trains passing on one side and the geese circling the pond on the other, the farmhouse white on the hill in the distance, the flag waving beside it.

I wonder who else noticed. Got to thank that newbie.

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Another name for the "I wonder 'bout that town" list: Peculiar, Missouri.