Day 5 - Silhouette

This silhouette is a picture of a sweet fox that lives near me.

So I don’t know how many of you live in a rural area. I thought I did growing up; it was a small town in Northern California where it felt like everyone knew each other. But that perspective shifted when I moved to Missouri. This place is RURAL.

I live on a 20 acre plot in Northwest Missouri, and I would venture to guess that my property is among the smallest around here. Neighbors are rare, and any form of human contact outside of picking my kids up from school or going into town to get groceries are even more so. When I first settled in here I was stir crazy, but eventually that gave way to a specific sense of serenity. I started to notice more, I appreciated the small noises more. My first real baptism into being a country boy was the unexpected warm feelings I developed for my local opossum (that came to be known as penny the ‘possum). This only blossomed, because I unexpectedly connected to many small (and likely vicious) creatures. Chief among them was this sweet fox.

I have seen her multiple times, and photographed her often. I have seen her with her set of beautiful kits wandering around my barn, and I have seen her stalking a mouse across my field. She sometimes crosses the road as I drive to the city when I want to feel some sort of civilization, and she even sometimes crosses the same spot in reverse when I return. I feel like we are both just living out in the wild here sometimes, existing in parallel.

In this picture, I like to imagine she is tired from a long day and looking forward to crawling into her den with her tiny kits, cuddly and warm and dreaming of yummy things.