Pigs and Cows

This morning, on my way home from school and yesterday's dorm duty, a headachy eight hours with four of them devoted to Al Brooks' pointless Robin Hood: Men in Tights and the equally inane Guitar Hero, both of which I was forced to observe, I needed to clear my head. I avoided the freeway on my first 15 or so miles, drove south along the Murfreesboro Highway/Highway 41, and then took a small detour by a sign I have long loved, announcing Stepp Road.The apparently homemade metal sign is beautiful: a balanced, even cheerful indication of what lies ahead. If one forgets that the cheerfully rendered pigs are raised for slaughter and do not, like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web, escape it through friendship and ability, the sign is charming. Despite the pig's intelligence, reputed to be high, we like its flavor. Indeed, this morning on the mountain I purchased bacon and pork chops. How crazy am I? If I can divorce myself from the fact of the meat's origin, I too can enjoy porcine flavor and advertisement on a back road.

That back road winds through a series of postcards -- cows standing peacefully in water, wild black-eyed susans billowing in the breeze, stark white farmhouses set back among trees, rolling hills and balds, narrow bridges over rocky creeks -- featuring the landscape, bucolic and murderous, of Middle Tennessee. I love it, blindly.