I am starting to realize just how many “sayings” come from the country. When you’re in the city and get the trash picked up every week you don’t think much about where that trash goes, except perhaps going so far as to separate your recycleables. I just posted on the Carroll County Freecycle website about some moving boxes that I’d like to give away. I found myself typing, “we’ll be taking them to the dump if nobody wants them, but I hate to see them go to waste.”

…”go to waste”. Now I see the literal meaning there. It is quite obvious (to be hauled off to the waste dump) but I just never really thought about it until now. These boxes will literally be “going to the waste” dump. I am suddenly hyperaware of this fact because it is I who will be taking them. I remember Mary writing about it on her blog when she lived here.

But that is not the only saying I’ve come to realize in literal terms. Here are a few others that have taken on a new – or rather OLD – meaning for us:

- Your chickens have come home to roost
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
- I can’t read that chicken scratch
- Barking up the wrong tree
(after talking to some ‘coon-hunters)
- Establish a pecking order
- No spring chicken
- Reap what you sow
(I’m not going to reap anything because I haven’t had time to sow it!)
- For the birds
(as in that bowl of cereal that’s been sitting out all night is…)
- Feeling cooped up
- Counting your chickens before they hatch
- Fly off the handle
(Like when you swing an ax and the top goes flying into the creek)
- Don’t get your feathers ruffled.
- Mending fences
(the opposite of burning bridges)
- Fly the coop
- Good fences make good neighbors
- To ‘buy the farm’
- An apple never falls far from the tree

… and there’s plenty more where those came from, but we just haven’t gotten to them yet. Sometimes sayings take on whole new meanings. Where once we might have been referring to a field of grain shocks, now we’re talking about ambiguity…
but we all know it’s not as “cut and dried” as that.