It's getting trickier to see any fields on a drive north in Collin County. In celebration of sunshine after a miserable gray week we went for a little road trip up Texas State Highway 289 aka Preston Road all the way to Celina. As we drove, we kept saying, "This used to be way out there." It all used to be WAY OUT THERE, but now it's not.Between the sprung-up subdivisions, the Sinacola and Komatsu heavy equipment scraping away, and restaurants lined up to the horizon, there are a few longhorn cattle. Not sure if the longhorns are there for real, or for faux Western ambiance. I'd just had a dream that I was smoking a Meerschaum pipe while sitting on a buffalo wearing a Disney princess costume, and Monday's sunlight was preternatural.
*To clarify, I was wearing the Disney princess costume and smoking the pipe. The buffalo was not wearing a costume or smoking. The dress was yellow. I had slept straight through sixteen hours due to a sinus headache, and the dream was extremely vivid.*
Celina, Texas, is a pronunciation problem. According to the Texas Pronunciation Guide, Celina is pronounced suh-LI-nuh. But Salina, Kansas is pronounced sal-eye'-nuh (i.e. singular, with a long I in the second syllable), as distinguished from the city of Salinas CA, which is pronounced sal-ee'-nus (i.e. plural, with a long E in the second syllable).
If you need to say, "This used to be way out there," it is ðɪs juzd tu bi weɪ aʊt ðɛr.
Gawking at the subdivisions filled with two-story, tall-roofed houses a song fragment bopped me on the head:
They're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
Whuh? Sparing you the googling, the song is "Little Boxes," by Malvina Reynolds, most notably recorded by Pete Seeger, not Burl Ives , Roger Miller, or the Kingston Trio. The houses sprouting from here to the county line are not cheap ticky tacky, but they do look all the same. For safety sake, we waited to google until after the fifty mile field trip.
And because it all used to be way out there, if you can remember the Viet Nam draft, I recommend Richard Russo's Chances Are....
© 2013-2019 Nancy L. Ruder
