Stranger in a Strange Land

Five years ago, my husband and I responded to an empty nest by moving to a farm in Loudoun County. It's been an adjustment. His commute by train can take hours. I enjoy tales of his train society, but I now spend more of my time with dogs, cats, horses and garden than I do with human beings.

In the mornings, I trek down my long gravel drive, with two dogs in tow, to fetch the paper. One rainy day I looked to the hillside, where a neighbor has one of the few remaining dairy farms in the county. Flames danced against the clouds. Fires are a common sight in my neck of the woods, not a cause for alarm. I have gotten so that I can tell what's on fire -- brush, trash, manure -- from the color of the flames and the density of the smoke.

Midway down the drive, I climb a grassy knoll to give my quarter horse a smooch. I hear the school bus coming before I see it. Luckily, my pajamas are concealed beneath my ankle-length coat. I remember getting the paper in Arlington -- opening the storm door, leaning out, reaching down and sometimes hurrying to the curb in my bathrobe to snatch it up. Urban neighbors know the color of one another's bathrobes and the sound of their neighbors' coughs and sneezes.

Here in the country, we know the rumble of our neighbor's pickup. We can tell when the farmer across the way takes his three-wheelers to feed the cows because of its not-unpleasant roar and because the cows start bellowing to beat the band. We also know if he is on his tractor or backing a livestock trailer into his drive -- all from motor sounds.

Gunfire out our way means someone is target shooting, deer hunting or killing a groundhog -- all legal. I haven't left all of my city sensitivities behind, though. While deer are as common as horses in the fields, and although they consumed my tomato plants last summer so neatly that my neighbor wondered if I had pruned the plants, I don't like the idea of strangers shooting in the direction of my house.

I asked my husband to put up "No Hunting" signs at the edges of our cornfield, and he complied, sporting his cowboy hat and driving his old pickup out to do the job. He had the truck and the hat in Arlington too. The kids at Washington-Lee would tease our daughter when her father came to pick her up at school because he was so easy to spot in the parking lot.

After feeding the horses, I get on my fat-tired bike to cross the cornfield and check on my husband's progress with the signs. The dairy farmer is there, his red tractor idling nearby. The two men might talk for an hour. I'm wearing my favorite Australian outback coat, which keeps the hay out of my neckline and waistband when I'm throwing bales over the fence. My arrival by bike, dressed in the long coat and flip-flops, is decidedly unfarmer-like. My husband is embarrassed for me to be seen by our neighbor, a career farmer.

The "No Hunting" sign is another source of embarrassment for him as the talk turns to hunting. I tell our neighbor that when I was alone on the farm one day, two guys drove up in a van and said that they were hunting at the back line. If they got a deer, they informed me, they'd need to use my drive to trailer it out. That is the reason for the signs, I say, but as I hear my own explanation, I realize that I'm not worried about the hunters' aim or about losing a few deer -- I just don't like people elbowing their way onto my property.

The farmer says his new neighbors in an enclave of million-dollar homes called the sheriff recently to complain about the early morning hunting on the hillside behind his farm. "Our children aren't safe waiting for the school bus," they exclaimed. The sheriff said he'd check it out, but he knew full well that the hunter was one of his deputies.

Like coyotes in Rock Creek Park, or me in my long coat riding a bike across my cornfield, urbanites in what is left of rural Loudoun County may be out of place, but we are here to stay -- just like the million-dollar homes that are sprouting left and right on the old farmlands.

-- Sally Pfoutz