JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

If you’re compulsive, like me and many others, you know how hard it is to get to a place where you feel at peace, enveloped in a sense of well-being, anxiety having drifted away.

For the first time in a long time I got to that place yesterday. And it carried over to today.

Here’s how it unfolded…

For the month of June, I’d been sick — struck low by a cold virus and sore throat I thought would never end. The symptoms finally started passing a week or so ago with the help of antibiotics and steroids.

So, as the Fourth of July weekend approached, I was in a fairly negative frame of mind, even though I was feeling better and thinking I might actually return to normal.

In addition to feeling subpar, I do not like fireworks…especially the loud, obnoxious, amateurish stuff that envelops Kansas City every Independence Day. So, there it was coming at us again — more haze, endless ka-booms! and worrying about how to calm the dog.

But a few days before the big day, we caught a break: Good friends Jim and Julie, who live in Midtown, asked us if we wanted to join them at their 100-acre “farm” in northern Missouri, west of Bethany and a mile or two from New Hampton, population 280.

Our daughter Brooks volunteered to spend the night at our house and take care of the dog and cat. So, on Sunday morning, we packed overnight bags and plenty of good food, including sausages and hot dogs from the Broadway Butcher Shop, and headed north.

We got to the farm about 1 or 1:30 and had lunch. Then we started in on the serious business — sitting on their porch and looking out at acre after acre of tall grass, stands of trees and the point on the horizon where the green melded into the blue sky. The only man-made thing in sight was the New Hampton water tower far out in the distance.

The only other human being we saw was a stocky farmer who, in late afternoon, showed up in a big tractor and began cutting the hay on the land next to Jim and Julie’s. On his first pass, he gave us a wave. He proceeded to cut for an hour or so and, after a break, he returned with a baling machine and proceeded to bale for an hour or so. Instead of being disruptive, though, the rise and fall of the droning engines seemed perfectly attuned to the setting.

We talked, of course. At one point, Julie reminisced about a family vacation when she and her brothers and sisters were young. They had gone to a rural area where there was nothing to do and one of her sisters complained about Dad having taken the family to a place where there was nothing to do but “watch the ground crack.”

So I started looking closer at the ground, at the part where the grass was cut fairly low around the cabin, to see if I could spot any fissures.

We spent a lot of time talking about — and obsessing about — ticks. They were out in force, invisible of course.

Jim, who was in the grass more than the rest of us, got several. After spotting them on his skin, he would pluck them off, pull a pair of pliers out of his pocket and squish them mercilessly. Even though the area was infested with them, he felt an obligation to reduce their ranks as best he could.

Late in the afternoon, Jim fired up the charcoal grill, and we had a veritable feast built around hot dogs and sausages. (For the record, Patty had a vegetarian sausage.)

When it began to get dark, we wondered if there would be any fireworks out in the distance. A while later, at the edge of the horizon, where the trees met the nighttime sky, sporadic eruptions of coordinated colors began appearing. It was the gentlest fireworks display I’ve ever beheld: First came the splash of colors. Three to five seconds later came gentle, muted booms. We could watch, talk over it or ignore it…whatever we wished.

Then there was the all-natural nighttime show: Fireflies that winked and blinked at us from 20 yards away and a sky full of stars that did the same from millions of miles away.

I slept well last night, no ticking through “things to do” today.

When we got up this morning, we ate breakfast and started packing up pretty quickly: Jim and Julie were due at the Lake of the Ozarks in the afternoon to meet family members.

Still, I made it a point to sit down and look at the ground for a few minutes to check for signs of cracking and to make sure the long, green vista was intact and the blue picked up where the green ended.