The Fields Of The North

The direction north, in relation to where I normally am in the house, begins outside the north wall. It takes in the porch, the yard, the tree, the other smaller, denser trees at the edges, the slope to the road, the road, then everything beyond the road.

Beyond the road are two fields. There is a fence separating them, and of course they are held back from the road by a fence running parallel to the road and an area called the ditch. The fields have occasionally had, in one, horses, maybe both have over the years. They extend, the one down to a house to the northwest, the other is more or less blank, except there are houses perhaps unrelated off to the east and northeast. Were you to go far enough north you would come to other houses and main roads for the town.

What I'm concerned with is what is directly across the road that runs east and west just north of our house. The two fields.

I've never ever been in either field. You would think at some point in the many years we've lived here that I would have been over there, but I haven't. It's reasonable, probably likely, for example, that a ball might have bounced down the slope and somehow have made its way into one of the fields. Or a Frisbee. But it's never happened. That is land my feet have not touched. And I really can't see it happening now.

I have definitely looked at the fields of the north many times. Not with any curiosity about what it'd be like to be there. If anything, my feelings have been just the opposite. I have been very content over here and not over there. I don't know who owns them, I don't want to know. I'm not interested in what they do, whether they have horses (I haven't seen one for many years), or what might happen to me if I were to encroach on their territory. I know I'm not going to, so it's nothing I need to worry about.

My contentment is completely here, south of there, and south of the north part of our own land. All the fields I shall ever want are somewhere other than north of our land.