I have no idea what possessed us to buy a 25-acre farm in the country. All I know is, when you’re young and enthusiastic and have no children, any lifestyle seems possible. Now when I look around at the paint peeling off the quaint country walls, fences falling down faster than the weeds can sprout to prop them up, abandoned organic garden in the front yard, half-finished putting green in the back yard...well, I sigh, crank up the volume on my geriatric heavy metal music, and dream of a time when I had to go camping to hear the crickets buzz. Now I just go in my bedroom.

By the way, why do crickets come inside the house to have their legs fall off? Couldn’t they embrace dismemberment just as easily outdoors? All those little legs, scattered around the carpet edges, give me the creeps. Imagine fighting a tortuous waist-high field of matted carpet fibers -- crawling, climbing, struggling..., and then having your limbs start dropping off. Ugh.

Anyway, we tried. We had cows, and looked after them pretty well until they learned to come and go as they pleased while we learned to look the other way. Finally the owner came and got them.

We mended fence until we learned just how little a barbed-wire fence really means to a Sherman tank when there are cows in heat on the other side. We bought a tractor for fourteen hundred dollars, then found out you can’t buy a tractor for fourteen hundred dollars. I, personally, have fought a five year battle with yard clutter that hasn’t quite come to an end yet -- it’s winding down like the Vietnam war; the soldiers trickle home but no one’s quite sure who won.

So when you pass one of those well-landscaped, pristinely serene country estates, you can be sure of two things: (1) it’s not mine, and (2) the owners have been diligent in the struggle against junk cars, old batteries, tires, water heaters, lumber, buckets, scrap metal, dog houses, dogs, and those hideous green weedy things that grow ten feet in one season and leave their stalks up all winter.

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“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

“What?”

“Home. We’re going home.”

“Oh. Where are we going?”

“To Katmandu.”

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Gardening, now.... Why do your parents always leave you to learn from your own mistakes? They sat back and chuckled while we double-dug a raised-bed, organic garden consisting of six twenty-five by five foot plots surrounded by railroad ties. The first year, we raised enough onions, black-eye peas, cucumbers, and turnips to feed the nation of Thailand for two years. The second year we raised enough basil and Roma tomatoes to feed the nation of Italy for two years, so we bought a full-sized freezer to store it in. The third year we raised children.

Now the garden grows ten-foot high weeds and the freezer stocks TV dinners. And my parents, both experienced gardeners, still sit back and chuckle.

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“Why is there a rock in the refrigerator?”

“I was saving it.”

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I can blame all the mistakes on them, those parents, those gardeners with the smug chuckle. They never told me that one packet of basil seed run amuck could take over an entire garden. They never told me about the fine line between rich, gorgeous ripe strawberries and mushy smush. Only thing I can’t blame on them is the fire ants. Where they live, there aren’t any fire ants. Obviously they don’t live in Texas.

My first introduction to fire ants came about six months after I moved here, a young enthusiastic computer programmer with a good job and a free-wheeling, independent spirit. I went for a bicycle ride, decked out in the regulation (silly-looking) bike rider’s gear, stopped at a light, rested my foot on the grassy curb beside the street. Suddenly a strange stinging sensation made me look down in mild annoyance. And before my eyes even located the source of the tiny sting my foot was enveloped in a million tiny stings screaming out for mercy.

Good thing I was old enough to no longer care about looking cool -- there’s no way to look cool while you’re letting a three-hundred dollar bicycle fall to the ground while you’re screaming, hopping up and down, ripping off your shoe and beating your ankle and foot with a frantic futile hand.

They’re not insects. they’re miniaturized alien beings with highly sophisticated communication equipment.

“Echo five, this is rogue six. Do you copy?”

“Rogue six, hold your fire. I have the red and blue battalions just coming into position on the left ankle and the green battalion ready on the right buttock.”

“Ready? One, two, three, fire!”

How do they DO that?

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You gotta ponder cows, though. How can a creature that looks like a Sherman tank jump over fences with the grace of a ballet dancer? When you try to chase them, they hesitate to the last minute, glancing at you out of skittish bovine eyes, then panic off into unpredictable directions. It’s nature’s survival spirit, to randomly scatter about so that you can never get more than one of them going in the same direction.

When we first had them over for supper, they sort of hung out for a few days, scouting out the lay of the land, getting us lulled into a false sense of insecurity. Then they scattered to the high hills.

I came home from work one day, idly noticing a herd of cattle in a nearby neighbor’s field that was remarkable only for its preponderance of “no trespassing” signs. Then I started to pull into my driveway and screeched to a stop. And since I was only going two miles an hour at the time, the screeching was not coming from the tires.

I went to get my partner in this idiotic enterprise, and we went to fetch the errant trespassers home. I grew intimately acquainted with the “scenic route” from the No Trespassing field to our field, traversing it at least three times that night. It led cheerily through babbling brooks (swampy mushes), gentle green undergrowth (poison ivy and prickly briar), and picturesque antique fencing (barbed wire fence that had mostly fallen down. With an emphasis on the ‘mostly.’)

We got them back, finally, after a maniac on a three-wheeler came to help divert them on their detour through a neighbor’s front yard that always looked like a showplace for Green Thumb Lawn Care. (Now, parts of it are VERY green.)

My partner in crime fixed the fence, and we shut the doors and pulled the shades down and went to sleep.

Next day they were out again. One of them made it all the way to the main highway that time, by paths and byways I now knew we were better off not knowing. Let’s just say, cows can go places ordinary mortals fear to tread. This time, we left them alone to find their own way back, and sure enough, they were back next morning, waiting at the front gate to be let in.

We opened the gate and let them in, scolding and forgiving and rejoicing and treating the wayward souls to a welcome home bag of range cubes.

They were gone the next morning.

And back the next.

After that, they came and went as they pleased, and we pretended we didn’t notice.

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“Why is Caribou crying?”

“Well, I just pushed her down.”

“Why did you push her down?”

“Well, I just wanted to.”