Country Morning.

City people sometimes mistakenly believe their intellectual development will become stunted in the country.  The isolation, the conformity, being away from the creative community...

Not true necessarily.

As a reader, in these times, with an eye out always for "on sale" reading materials from second-hand stores, estate auctions, and library backrooms, you come upon some interesting old things that country people have preserved over the decades.

Not just the seemingly valuable stuff -- Woodrow Wilson's hardset series of U.S. history, or Source Records from the Great War -- but the earlier paperbacks and instructional non-fiction back when reading was still the primary entertainment, a source for independent education.

When I find that camera, (I think Mal's got it)
I'll show you some day what I've been delving into recently. 
In some ways, not being paid to research, or being a more categorical, allegedly disciplined reader has worked to my advantage, I'd say. 

My interests are broad, and my instincts confirmed over time:  writers simply wrote better, conveyed more, treated readers with more respect, back when it was a more relevant trade.
--------------------------------------------
This morning, my travels took me off the paved roads, to deliver an older gentleman to therapy at the aptly named Nature's Edge, right outside of Rice Lake.  The cooler morning meant fog, as the earth exhales into the open air. 

Then I came home, read this, and knew why right now*, this home is the place I need to be...

What’s missing in Manhattan is a seasonal fog, the kind that foretells autumn. This is the time of year when cool air begins to run downhill, gathering in the hollows and turning to ground fog. At dusk and just after, it drifts in narrow banners, head-high, across the low spots in the country north of the city. It comes out of the cattails and emanates from the hemlocks. Wherever it crosses the highway, it looks solid in the headlights — a dense silver stream — and then it turns insubstantial. Now and then it turns out not to be fog at all, but a low slip of wood-smoke from an early stove.

Surely there were ground fogs in Manhattan once, when everything north of Canal Street was still woods and meadows, when the island still kept its natural contours, the rise and fall of a rocky island. And surely there would have been wood-smoke mingling with those fogs until the breeze blew them out over the water. Sometimes, still, you can find tree-clinging fogs in Central Park. But it would be pleasant, even now, to step outdoors and see a low mist crossing Broadway or wandering down Lexington Avenue like ghostly pedestrians just before dawn, announcing the coming of autumn.

-----------------------------
* For the heightened sensual development.

Get out there and make it another good weekend, you too.