First World Problems, Rural Edition

I think I mention this every year, but fall always takes me by surprise.  It seems like summer is just peaking -- we're drowning in tomatoes and yellow squash, I'm dashing back and forth to the airport and trying to muster the discipline to get work done in between. Buuuut, the mountains are basking in the sunlight. And the river is made of green and gold glass. And everyone is wading around in the water hip deep, with wine glasses . . . and there's absolutely no reason to hurry . . .

Then, BAM.  One day all the squash plants are dead, and the well house is renovated but not yet insulated, and I'm waking up in the dark, thinking, "Hurry, hurry, hurry," as I hustle the kids out of the house and into the car to fight the deer traffic all the way to work.

Not that the deer traffic is bad all the way to work.  It's only the first six miles or so that it's really touch and go.  The fawns, losing their spots, frisk from woods to pavement to woods, never seeing us while we wait.  The does give us mild looks that still manage to say, "Stay where you are." And the young bucks saunter across the road, glancing back over their shoulders with looks that aren't quite interest as I up-shift and gain a few hundred yards.  Eventually we reach the highway, and fly through the fog and light, third gear, fourth gear, fifth. Farms flashing by, swoop.  Full moon on our left, rising sun on our right, all eyes on the lookout for wildlife.

I'm not particularly good at breathing in the fall, and this complicates my commute somewhat during the times that the plants near my office are making breathing harder than the plants near my house.  After I drop off the kids, I go to my office and check my breathing.  If the numbers are good, I sit down and start working, then check again.  If my lung function drops 20% in the first half hour -- which it did today -- I'm back in the car and headed south again, hoping to rescue the shreds of my productivity, and listening to Florence and the Machine's 'Lungs' very loud. 

Today, just as Florence was really getting going and I was hoping my lungs would get the hint, my wildlife radar pinged, and a little hawk came in the corner of my vision as it struggled into the air clutching a snake.  The hawk was putting up a good fight, but so was the snake.  They managed to clear the top of my car by a few feet as I came in line with their flight path, and the last I saw of them they were buffeted upward by my slip stream.  Something about the motion made me think the hawk had lost his grip, and his meal.  I spent the rest of the drive home feeling bad for him.

It was only later that I thought to feel good for the snake.