A Trip to Bat Cave

So my friend D is happily ensconced in her incredibly beautiful new house perched snugly at the top of a mountain in Bat Cave and S and N and I drove up there yesterday to visit her. On the way back we stopped to take pictures of kudzu and cows, since there were plenty of both, although not, sadly, in combination. We rejected some brown and black cows as being not photogenic enough, but these spotted cows are perfectly glamourous and in fact enough to make a Barbizon painter turn faint and green with envy. Kudzu always looks like monsters to me; as if the monsters had been ambling along through the valleys and suddenly been caught up by the vines and stuck there, helpless in a sea of green. Either monsters or fairy tale castles, vistas from another world: things we wouldn't know were there at all until the kudzu captured them for a summer.

D's house is spectacular. It's posh without being ostentatious, homey without being shabby - it reconciles all those good things effortlessly and even has a tiny, wonderful guesthouse and a vegetable garden which the previous owners left fully running along complete with mountains of tomatos and squash and greasy beans. There's a big open field above her and a tiny creek running alongside and woods all around; a dirt road, a patch of lawn and really, what more do you need? I was overcome with jealousy but only briefly; I did my country living time in Maryland and while I enjoyed it, I don't want to go back. I like living near the city, on a bus line, close enough where I can get downtown in a heartbeat and yet still have my big garden. I need people around me or I start to get way too introverted; it doesn't take much for me to forget how to talk to people (shut UP. You should see me when I've actually been alone for days and days and you could tell the difference then.) and get really strange.

Granted my garden is not as good as D's, but then clearly I am much lazier than the people who used to own D's house. I'm great in the spring, but by the time July rolls around I've kind of lost interest, and by August I really can't be bothered. Oh well, you can't change your nature, and mine is just suited to the city, I think, But I'm delighted D is here, with her parrot and guinea pigs and bunnies (the female bunny lives in a big pen with 3 or 4 male guinea pigs who are constantly humping her; she takes it with equanimity and D says so far there have been no hideous mutant guinea rabbits resulting) her salamander and cat and little dog Cookie. I have full intentions of spending a lot of time out there in the country now myself, now that she's here and I can go anytime I please, oh yeah.