As a child of the inner city, I was seduced by three manifestations of “rural” and what that meant: yellow school buses, “RFD” on mailboxes and a fifth-grade field trip to Cook’s Canyon, a wildlife sanctuary in Barre, Massachusetts. City buses were ubiquitous in Worcester, a part of the urban landscape as they plied their […]

As a young child living in Portland in the 1960s, I would be beyond excited when my parents would plan a summer weekend excursion with my brother and me to our great-aunt and great-uncle’s rural farm in Madison. After a nearly two-hour drive, we would finally pull up to the circular, dirt driveway of Uncle […]

A thick white sap oozed from the diagonal slash in the bark of the tree. Gravity gently pulled the liquid downward toward half of a coconut shell fastened to the tree trunk to collect this precious resource. I stood in the middle of a rubber tree forest in the rural inland foothills of Sri Lanka, […]