Several weeks ago, Pentimento posted something about city life that I meant to respond to, but I found I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to say. I sympathize with her nostalgia for the place where she spent most of her life. And because most of my growing up was done in a rural setting, my initial response was something of a defense of country life. Anthologies are full of odes to places in the country that have meaning and resonance for poets and artists. And while in a small town, you can't help being known, you can still find places to hide, to escape into obscurity, like the old bridges and cemeteries no one visits anymore.
But I can't really claim that country life has superior merits, because I keep thinking of cities that I have loved. I suppose there are city people and there are country people, like in Aesop’s fable, but I find it hard to argue that one way of life has primacy over another.
I didn’t really grow up in the country, but the town where we lived most of my childhood was more rural than urban. I’ve always sympathized with the country mouse in the fable; Aesop seems to want you to. I wanted to live in the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder and have horses and a goose named Alexgander. I always thought I’d be a farmer’s wife or the farmer when I grew up. My parents waited until I was married with children before buying acreage, and cows and horses and chickens to inhabit the acreage, but I can still claim a family farm in my ancestry.
And now living the country life is cool. It’s what people who are passionate about food do, or people who are passionate about family life, or about wine or about horses. Hasn't there been a minor exodus of people leaving cities for the country with high-minded ideals about sustainable living?
But people who have always lived on farms don’t always come across as passionate. They work hard, they get dirty, they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what other people think of them. They are a bit grey, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz says.
And it’s easy to acknowledge the stereotype of the rugged individualist that Pentimento mentions. Most of my parents’ neighbors seem like the kind of people who don’t wait around for things to be done for them. They fix stuff for themselves. They have the equipment and knowledge to move the earth they way they want it to go. In comparison to the do-it-myself attitude of the rural resident, city dwellers seem to be more apt to wait for someone else to fix things for them. I admire the independence of the county dweller; at the same time that I wonder if I could hack it on a farm.
Most of my grown up years have been spent in urban areas, or near urban, although this duty station is different. Since being married, my husband and I have lived in apartments near downtown Dallas, near downtown Newport, near downtown Norfolk, and near "downtown" Biloxi. (When in Illinois we did not live near downtown Chicago, but we lived near the center of our town.) These are small towns in comparison to NYC, but they were an urban enough that I often didn’t need a car, and we could smell our neighbors’ dinners and hear the murmurs of their evening conversations. Sometimes our next door neighbor in Norfolk would chime in to our conversations because we always had our windows open.
I knew her, and now I know all the folks on our street by name, and a good number of those on the next block. But I didn’t know the names of the people who lived on the floor above us in 3 of our first four apartments. And in the fourth one, I didn’t know the guy above us, or the name of our landlord, even though he came to do our yard maintenance very so often, because we worked through a rental agency. This was partly a failure of nosyness on my part. But it was also a necessary form of protecting our privacy, when the neighbors very well could have been privy to the most intimate of our conversations through the waterpipes.
So I have learned to love cities, both because of and despite the anonymity. When we went back to visit Dallas last summer, my heart soared when I saw those great white highway overpasses silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. A monument to ingenuity.
And I will always feel a rush of adrenalin from driving up from the south to the great crowded toll booths undercharging to experience Chicago, my favorite city. I think I’ve had a peek at some of the US’s biggest: LA’s downtown seemed lifeless in comparison to Chicago, New York too large, Houston too sprawling, St. Louis too shabby. San Francisco was beautiful, but too hip for me. DC is a great place to visit, but I’ve never wanted to live there. Boston has charm, but is too elite for my Midwestern soul. I have to vote for Chicago.
Meanwhile, my parents, out on 80 acres in the center of the Midwest, know their neighbors for the next five miles, and know pretty much everything public about them. Gossip gets traded at the tractor repair shop, at the mini-mart, at the parish festivals. Even in the small town where I did most of my growing up, gossip got around. I couldn’t run around town without wind of my roaming getting back to my family. The grapevine quickly spanned the distances between people. But it didn't reveal motives or interior struggles.
My husband and I have recurring conversations about where we’ll settle when the Navy is done with us. I need green space and open roads too much to make my forever house in a large urban area. But my husband has commented more than once that he is nervous sometimes out in the county. I like to tease him about this, but there was a family a mile or so from my parents’ farm who were massacred by their crazy son-in-law shortly before my parents moved to the area. My husband also is concerned that educational options are limited in the country. Rural living didn’t shortchange people like Thomas Jefferson, but I can’t help but admit that there are more opportunities in an urban area.
So we’ll probably compromise and live in a medium-sized town – maybe a college town. Ideally it would be someplace with a town square that had a good book store and coffee shop, and plenty of places to run. It’s pleasant to daydream about living in one of those lively little vacation towns in the mountains or lakeside like Charlottesville or Berea or in Michigan (although I’m getting spoiled with mild winters).
But in the long run, where I really want to live is close to family. We've been reading The Wizard of Oz outloud lately and came across the source of Dorothy's toe-clicking quote: "No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There's no place like home."
I hope my kids develop a sense of home. I want them to settle somewhere near us in our old age. I don't think they'll feel called to return to Guam. As much as we try to make our place homelike by hanging curtains and familiar photos and pictures of the family, I still don’t feel rooted here. This is like a 2 or 3 year vacation. Kinda like the rest of our sojourns. Probably what I should be daydreaming about is not the someday home, but about how to live the present wayfarer’s life more fully, more rooted in faith. A good reason to feel grateful for Advent.
