Until yesterday, I did not think about the fact that it had slipped away. It came suddenly and unexpectedly and it left. It seemed to make an impact at the time but obviously the impact was not as big as I thought. I did not miss it until I saw him: the old guy in the hitchers, the plaid shirt, and the grain company cap.

As a child, I had little relationship to anything rural. The closest I came was in trying to avoid my mother�s contempt. My mother had grown up on a farm and had little patience with certain sensibilities to smell, taste, bugs, and other such. �City kid,� she would hiss as though there were nothing worse on the face of the earth. I learned to keep my thoughts to myself about the smell of cows---or outhouses.

But I wasn�t really a city kid either. I learned that as a young adult living in New York City. I loved it but promptly fled back to my roots as soon as I had kids. I am a suburban kid. For better or worse, I�ve been a suburban kid all my life.

But Mr. Philately has a rural past. He used to joke that he was born in a barn. He wasn�t but he grew up on a farm with a father who farmed. As a teenager, he made money walking beans and detassling seed corn. And those rural roots influenced our life. Never mind that my father laughed when I told him that Mr. Philately and I would get married after the crops were in. My mother knew we were telling the truth and she knew why. Farmer Father-in-Law could not come to a wedding in New Jersey until the crops were in.

When I first met his family and for years and years after that, Mr. Philately and I would make pilgrimages to Iowa and its rural communities. Kat met Mr. Turkey---and later, after Thanksgiving, mourned Mr. Turkey�on those trips. Day-Hay met her close friend, Junior the Outside Dog, on one of those trips and even e-mailed him when we returned (Her aunt promised to deliver the e-mail. I never asked if she actually did.) The girls laid across the hood of a car with their Dad out on a farm and saw more stars in the sky then they ever knew existed. They even met buffalo (during a time when some were touting Beefalo.)

And I remember the men. Before the girls came along, Mr. Philately and I would go to Arlene�s Caf�. If we got there early enough, we could buy cinnamon rolls. We could buy the best cinnamon rolls I have ever had. But if we didn�t, the guys in hitchers got them. They would still be there when we arrived, having come to town to pick up their mail, drink their coffee, and have some human contact. The older ones would linger because they could.

Somehow, that connection to the rural seemed exotic and exciting. But then my mother-in-law left the rural areas and, more recently Farmer Father-in-Law retired to suburban Missouri. (I�ve never been clear whether Missouri is a step up or a step down from Iowa.) Rural are no longer us at all.

And the old guys in hitchers are gone from my life.

|