The good ol' days

Hi, welcome back.  It seems I'm the only one posting here so far, so I would like to encourage my visitors to post.  Post what you want, as long as it's clean, you know the deal.  Anyways, I'm back from a brief vacation from the internet, due to my service provider finally shut me off. If you have read my previous posts, you know that I've been unemployed for a few months now, and finding a job is like finding a bag full of money someone dropped.  I am back now, for a while, apparently writing for a few people to read, so I'll finally start explaining the reason for the title of this blog.  "The good ol' days"; you might have noticed the old black and white picture at the top of my blog home page, and I chose it for my "logo" for a reason.  The picture was taken in the 70's , I am unsure of the exact year, and it was taken in Kentucky, where I used to live when I was about 10 years old. The house you can barely make out, on the right,  is the house I lived in, with my mother, sister and brother.  It was the good old days back then for plenty of reasons.  First of all, I was just a kid, without a care in the world, other than when my next meal was on the table:)  The landscape down there was beautiful, the air so fresh, and if you were hungry, there was all kinds of fruits and vegetables growing all around.  There was even a lake a little more than a half mile through the woods to the left of the picture, or about a mile if you continued down the road in the direction the picture is displaying.  The water that ran through small streams, through the hills, and down to the lake, was so pure, I couldn't help but drink it. (though I know now in adulthood, that probably wasn't a good idea)   It was the perfect spot, at the time to be a kid, even though I only lived there for a year.  I have been back and forth from Michigan to there all of my life though , because family on my dad's side lives on that street.  It was the best memories of my young life living there, and I learned a lot there for those 12 or 13 months.  There, I could wander through the woods, which gave me good directional skills that I still have today.  I would build forts, with my brother and sister, and climb trees, and swing on vines over deep valleys, or ride bikes down hills. All the things city boys only daydreamed about up north.  Although there were many dangerous animals out there, they never attacked us, except I was charged by a bull a couple of times.  The cows on the property, would always be watching us carefully when we would walk by them, but they would just keep their distance, and continue eating.  We owned several pets down there; a dog, two cats, two chickens, and a one-legged rooster.  By the time we moved back up to MI, the two chickens were killed by weasels, and the dog was bit by a snake, and died after a few days.  We gave our rooster (w/1/leg) to our neighbors, who already had a rooster and many chickens.  When our rooster was put in the cage with the other one, they fought for a few minutes, with our rooster winning!  The next day I walked down to the neighbor's house to check on him, and there he was in the cage with about 10 hens laying around him.  The other rooster had 2. 
Anyways, enough about animals.  The best part of living down there to me, was the friendly people.  You would be driving by them, and even though you've never met them before, they would wave at you.  Even when I went to school there, the kids obviously knew I wasn't from there, from my northern accent, but I was soon excepted by most of my classmates.  Many seemed interested in me because they had never met a "Yankee" before.  There was a slight language barrier at first, and I was confused many times when talking to them, but by the end of the year, I had acquired  a relatively close accent to theirs.  I noticed too, that my classmates didn't pick on others in the school who were either overweight, ugly, or otherwise different.  The people down there had a "different" way about them, compared to us folk in the North or big cities.  They never seemed in a hurry, and somehow tardiness wasn't much of an issue; they rarely resorted to violence, although they talked like they were ready for it at all times, and they were never quick to jump to conclusions.  I can't put a number on how many fights I've been in or almost been in, up here, when someone misunderstood what I was saying or doing.  Yeah, the country folk seemed real laid back and relaxed, the kind of life, I hope one day, I could have again.
Well, that's enough from me for now.  Talking about all that has got me thinking about wanting to find a way to get back to the "good life".  But, I'm probably stuck up here with my life.  Thanks for reading, I'll write again soon.