Rural Politics and the Spring Runoff

In my parents' silver Sequoia, aptly named for its stocky presence, we clap mosquitos between our palms, a kind of somber applause. My mom, dad, and I are driving toward two large, vinyl, geodesic structures that sit visibly on a shrub-covered hill that rolls between Dry Creek in Bloomington, Idaho, and Worm Creek on the St. Charles side. The property my parents own in Bloomington looks well tended-to, courtesy of new mowing blades on the tractor and the morning we spent working with the raspberries. The structures on the hill, the ones we're driving toward, are pale green. They blend well with the vegetation up close, but they reflect sunlight so vividly as to glare bright white from the highway. This seems opposite, to me. In the country, a building should inhabit its space closely, the way a wooden barn sinks into the dull yellow of a field of timothy grasses, (I'm just now learning to inhabit my own apartment this way, with this closeness); and if a building is to appear impressive, should impose itself only in intimacy.