The pictures below were taken on my uncles farm in Missouri. His farm was our inspiration for moving our family and home to the Midwest. Thank you Steve, for sharing your love of home and family.
"At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city... of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heros. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom.
The incummunicable trees begin to persuade is to live with them, and quit our lives of solemn trifles. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind. All memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present (cares), and we were led in triumph by nature.
These enchantments are medicinal , they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
