I guess I should start out by sharing why I decided to call this little pet project of mine “The Big Front Yard”. One of my favorite science fiction authors is Clifford Simak. His books were among the first that I started to read when I was a teenager and I liked them because he somehow blended the backwoods and wilds, the people that live and science fiction concepts of time travel, robots and the obligatory alien visitors to create really entertaining stories. Of the list of my most loved novels of his is “Way Station”, about an immortal Civil War veteran that manages a way station (alien B&B for alien visitors and diplomats while on there way to other distant worlds and “Mastadonia” about a group of people in Wisconsin that along with the alien “cat face” create a time travel business. My amateurish attempt at blogdom however is named after a short story of his that won the Hugo award titles “The Big Front Yard” it is the story of a man who discovers that aliens have turned the front half of his house into a kind of gateway. His front door now opens out onto an alien plane where different races can come together for trade and discovery. This story in a way loosely describes my own or really anyone’s front yard transformed from one limited by ones fence or property lines to encompass the entire region or world. My door is more then just a hunk of wood now it’s a gateway through which I pass to discover and explore all the things beyond it.
I use my front door to go to work and the store too but now I look at things just a little differently, everything has a history or a story that tells us about the creatures or plants that may have lived there, even people. Just as I examine and follow animal tracks in the wild, people also leave things behind. Trash, earth works, technology, architecture all leave traces that can enlighten the observer. “Outside Lies Magic” is a nice book written by John Stilgoe. His book is about being observant and seeing the history that is right in front of us when we take a stroll down the street. Everything from paints in buildings to manhole covers.
I won’t ramble but I hope I can contribute to this experiment every week or so. It seems my interest range so wide that perhaps I should have no problems boring my readers to wanting to run out of their own front doors perhaps to make discoveries of their own out in the big front yard.
