We have lived in our house near Eaton Canyon for more than 20 years. To get here you have to drive past the Eaton Canyon Golf Course a nine hole county course.

For many years it irked me that the operators of the course didn’t trim their bushes and make the street frontage look neat and well manicured. I considered writing to them or posting signs to pressure the management into making it more respectable. I would get particularly incensed when I walked along Sierra Madre Blvd and had to walk on the parkway strip because the Oleander bushes were not trimmed. And I would add with righteous indignation “they don’t even irrigate the parkway and it is full of rodents.”

A few months ago I had an epiphany about our neighborhood. We live in one of the last pockets of countryside in an increasingly urban and suburban area. It is a nice thing that the golf course doesn’t have curbs or sidewalks. The tatty old chain link fence is a link to another way of life when there were barns and feed stores nearby and people raised their own food. The rodents attract coyotes whose howling in the night makes us feel connected to nature in a way that the Discovery Channel never can.

Now I see the unkempt perimeter of the golf course not as something to be fixed but as something to be preserved. When I finally stopped to think about it I realized that “countryside” is by definition a bit wild and overgrown and not “kept” and now I like it that way. Now I want to live in a slightly rural area and my angst over the golf course not being perfectly urban has ended.

There is a lesson to be learned here but I’m not sure what it is.