This week the farm feels too far away.

I ran an errand today, bringing a friend his credit card that I had held for him last night and forgot to give back. He even told me to hang on to it, trying to save me a trip, saying he could grab it from me tomorrow. "Not a chance, I'm on my way."

I needed to do something. I cringe saying that, expecting to hear my mother's voice still say "if you're bored, I'll give you something to do". But I feel now, as I did then, that while chores are necessary, they don't exactly thrill or satisfy the soul. There's laundry, hay, weeding, watering, phone calls, checkbook balancing - all there waving at me with about as much excitement as a wet glove.

If you're bored it's because you're boring. Maybe I am boring right now. What I did realize is that I'm also lonely. Which is not a sensation that I'm used to.

It's not a so-lonesome-I-could-cry, looking for love, kind of way, but in that I just need some more people around me cause the cats, dog, and occasional chat with the farmer and his kids ain't cutting it. Steve Earle once talked about how to tell if you've gone too rural - when you wake up from a nap to the sound of gunfire and discover your wife in her panties and bra shooting off the back porch at feral cats.

We have guns, I have a porch and undergarments, so while I would never shoot at a cat, wild or not, there's plenty of other things to choose from, animal and mineral. I'm trying to avoid getting to the Annie Oakley skivvies potshot stage.

So I went to Panera to have some company and I must confess - be entertained. Some go for bread, I go to see ladies dressed up in ways New Englanders don't, and men wearing sunglasses indoors without irony.

Did I mention I live an hour and a half from Manhattan? It's worlds, if not too many miles, away. The city fades quickly and there's a moment driving down 80 West when it seems as though everything else has fallen away and suddenly you're really out there. The trees get bigger and darker; at night the sky opens up and the stars get close enough to sparkle.

Besides going to Manhattan can be a crapshoot in this kind of a mood. It's like rummaging around the kitchen cabinets, opening and closing the refridgerator, expecting with each new peek that a miracle of spontaneous food generation will have occurred. It's not actually about hunger, but something else. And no amount of blueberries, doritos, or chocolate ice cream is going to do the trick, fill the hole, solve the puzzle.

Folding laundry is not going to fix this Mom.

Or maybe it will. Sticking with the routine, going through the motions perhaps, but still completing the daily tasks that need to be done could fix me, or at least be a means of moving through.

When I was younger, the idea that feelings passed was alien to me. However I was in the present was where I would be stuck until something came to pass - I needed to do something, and while action is truly necessary for change, the manner in which I generally acted was not the positive resolution type. I had to get rid of certain feelings like a ticking bomb. A sense of conclusion or logical completion was absent. I still have trouble with finales - I tried to take a storytelling class and realized I had no endings.

So I made myself run this morning. I'm at the library now, post-Panera writing this. There's a math tutor and student near me. Moms and kids are looking at movies to borrow, a little boy shouted "Power Puff Girls is the best movie you will ever see!" 

It's good to know that children still hum Frere Jacques while wandering around in the summertime.