it's like roosters in the suburbs...

I am living in Loganville, GA, which is the outer suburbs of Atlanta. I had a conversation with someone recently about Loganville not being "suburbs" but rather "rural suburbs." My theory is based on how easy it is to see livestock in a given "suburban area." If you can pull out of a suburban neighborhood and see cows or horses or chickens or....llamas...it cannot truly be the suburbs. It's that place where the sprawl has reached, but not covered, a given area. I am staying at a house "keeping watch over" two middle/high school girls this weekend while their parents are away. They live in a suburban neighborhood in a nice house and you would never know there was a "rural" remnant until you got our of your car and the sound of a chorus of hundreds of crowing roosters fills your ears. If you walk onto their back deck, the hill leading from their back yard flows down into a couple of acres of woods that apprently house a farm. Their back yard literaly backs up to hundreds of roosters and chickens and horses....and then a busy suburban street on the other side. My guess is that this farm was here way before the suburbs existed...no one would place their farm in the middle of the suburbs. The farm is a final standing remnant of what use to be common, but now seems out of place.
Maybe this rural remnant is not all that unlike things like hope and meaning and light and deep, unhindered relationship.
These things are echoes of what once was...like C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity...

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

We use to live in a Garden, where hope and unhindered relationship was the rule and now we only have remnants of that place; we feel a deep desire for meaning and hope and love and yet, those desires cannot be fully satisfied here. They are like roosters in the suburbs; they speak of that which was common and is now only a remnant. We are in the rural Garden, where though the Garden is mostly unkept and overgrown with weeds some uncovered flowers remain and when you happen upon those beautiful remnants, your heart is reminded of its true home.