Joining the other Humans

It's like there's fee for joining up - the opposite of a signing bonus.

Currently, still, I live in the country.  Alone/  Sort of alone.   But here in the country, there are now more mustangs (Fords), and man they must stang! And there are young boarders on their skate boards.  And quiet streets full of emptiness like death.   Retirees plugging in at the RV park.  Or parking at the fire plug.
No one joins me.  But it's not the country anymore.  Not for them anyway.

My old house was moved out here, to the middle of Egypt, in 1973 - the year I crossed the Mason and Dixon line for good - and ill.
And then slowly, but then with greater and greater speed and thickness,  the masses - replete with jobs and children in prisons made by the Independent School District and home entertainment centers - cluster nearby, talking about me just up the Nile from them.  And wishing they could live in my house, on my few acres;  to which all the deer and the antelope and the rattlers and opossums and rats and mice and bugs and smaller bugs and wasps ....  have flocked.     Since the new houses are 6 per acre, you see.  Or 7 for luck.   It's so quiet in those neighborhoods!

I mostly avoid them.  When I don't, it's usually okay.  Which has led me to think -   "I shall leave Egypt forever and join folks in the old home town," which has grown into a pulsing deathstar of booming modern hubub.   (That's Austin, TX to you)

So, yeah, there's a fee.   $Half a Million.  Inexorably.     I am to be a neighbor among neighbors.  And I will be well-liked by one or two.  And my favorite city haunts will be increasingly haunted by me, on foot even.   And my grandsons will visit, on holidays.  And my soul will not extinguish, and I will sometimes not be sad.

Hurry!  Supplies are going fast!