Luke has a couple jobs this summer; one that his mom got him, working downtown in an office four or five days a week, and one doing some house-sitting and critter-watching maybe 50 miles north of downtown, up near Canton, Ga. After he gets done with his day job downtown, Luke makes his way up to spend the night at his “other” house, collecting eggs from the chickens out back, feeding three dogs and two cats and, basically, getting a feel for the bachelor life. I think he likes it.

The rub is, he took the house-sitting gig before his mom got him the job at her office downtown, and the office thing keeps him away from the “other” house for eight, 10, 12 hours at a time. Someone has to go look in on the menagerie during the day. Someone, it seems, with a bit more “flexible” of a schedule.

So I’ve been taking the back roads up to Canton in the afternoons, getting to know Junebug and Maisy and Ginger and the two cats. (I don’t mess with chickens.) I use the wireless in the house for a few hours. It all works out.

I really don’t mind it because, after fighting traffic to go downtown for 10 hours or so every week for six years, tooling around on winding rural roads is a nice relief. It’s not Montana up there, but the sky is big, the terrain is rolling — you’d hardly know you were butting up against a metropolitan area of nearly 6 million people.

I stopped on a tiny two-lane country road yesterday to snap the above picture. As one famous movie slacker once said:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.