Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Garden of Eden (aka Rix Mills)...

So, just now I was outside calling my dog and I was listening to many things. The lambs, the birds, the rooster. Plus, I was enjoying my own light show with the fireflies, or, as we in southeastern Ohio call them, lightning bugs.

It is quite unbelievable to me that there are people who don't open their backdoor to these sights and sounds.

Rix Mills is in my bones, in my blood. I love Rix Mills like it's a living, breathing person. I have no idea how far back in my family Rix Mills goes. My great-grandmother, Kate Tom, grew up in Rix Mills, and I have no idea how much further back it goes.

I utterly cannot imagine living anywhere else. It is the most beautiful place on earth to me, and to many others who have shared with me how much they love the view from Terra Cotta Vineyards, which is just up the road.

My kids live in the world that I grew up in. They smell the honeysuckle every spring, they watch the lambs nursing in the backyard, they feel the wind blow through like a tornado in the fall. They attend the Rix Mills Presbyterian Church every Sunday, just like I did, and my mom, and her mom, and on and on. They play outside with the Baughman kids, just as my sister and I played with those same Baughman kids' dads.

I'm sure that to many (perhaps to most) Rix Mills is too remote, too far out. I understand that best in the winter, when our road is like a sled ride to town. But even then, I would never want to wake up anywhere else. I have always wanted to live in the very house that I live in, for as absolutely as long as I can remember.

Rix Mills Remembered by Paul Patton, and featuring his wonderful paintings, is a wonderful book about the history of Rix Mills that I highly recommend. You can even read it at the library, as they have it in the reference department. My grandmother is the piano player in the painting "The Pig in the Parlor."

Reading it is like having a conversation with my grandma, who I miss every single day. She called Rix Mills "the Garden of Eden" and passed all of her love for it into my heart.

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