Country Mouse and City Mouse, Part I

We spent spring break at my parents’ home in suburban Nashville.  After a week nestled in the warm embrace of comfortable Suburban Sprawl, we returned to our apartment in the somewhat grittier Big City of New Orleans, and most of the drive from the former to the latter was spent in discussion about which is a Better Environment for Raising Children.  We have drawn no conclusion, and rest easy in the knowledge that this debate is largely moot anyway, since we’ll live where The Professor gets a job and we are pretty much resigned to the fact that we don’t get to pick where that is.

However.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past five or so years (yeah dawgs, October 2005 is when I started this blogging lark!), it’s which of my conversations are great blog fodder, and this was one.  For you readers: a little debate, a little back and forth, nothing too contentious – and for me: an opportunity to splash it out in written form and see what it all means.

When at my parents’ place, Jack spent most of the days out of doors.  The backyard at Chez ‘Rents is small and kind of awkwardly shaped, but so is Jack, so they were a perfect match.  The back door opens onto a lovely small patio where my parents have some chairs, a firepit thing, and very soon will have a container garden*.  They have speakers on the back porch – speakers, might I add, which are not chained or welded or otherwise indelibly attached to the house, but simply hung up – AND NOT STOLEN IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.  Note this.  This is important.  Although my dad has one of the strangest mixes of music known to man on his Ipod, it was still very pleasant to sit in the backyard, eat supper off card tables, bask in the glow of the firepit, and listen to barbershop singing, musical theatre, Mantovani, and Schoolhouse Rock.  One day, Jack sat out in the sideyard with my mother, “helping” her dig stones out of the yard and put them in a bucket.  She opined that next time we visit, a wading pool might be located on that same spot, for her darling grandson(s) to paddle around in.  Other neighbor kids spent many sunny hours playing in the culdesac.  Actually, they didn’t, because my parents don’t have a lot of neighbors yet – houses are still going up in this brand new subdivision – but the point is, they could, without (much) fear of being crushed or snatched or getting lost.  When we watched a movie in the mind-bogglingly enormous room-over-the-garage, my dad’s subwoofer boomed and crashed and thudded, and no one worried a bit about disturbing the neighbors.  (Notice a speaker theme?  My dad loves his sound systems.)  The house is large and comfortable, the kitchen pantry is bigger than the clothes closet that Jack and I share, and the lawn is lush and green and free of broken glass, used hypodermic syringes, and other detritus from 50 years ago that floats up out of the city soil whenever it rains.

Ah, but there are things not to love as well.  To go anywhere that is not the neighbor’s house down the street, one must drive.  Even if one was feeling frisky and wanted to walk or, more appropriate due to the distances involved, wanted to cycle to the store or the park, the road off of which springs my parent’s subdivision is a skinny, winding road with no shoulders and crazy too-fast drivers and lots of narrow bridges.  A quick jaunt to the grocery for that missing dinner ingredient will take, at best, the better part of an hour.  And to get anywhere that has cultural value or interest – a coffee shop, a zoo, a museum, the library – one must drive through tons of traffic and stoplights and strip malls and soulless suburban sprawl.  I don’t judge soulless suburban sprawl – I like the convenience of American shopping as much as the next guy, and I know more than the next guy probably does given I lived in England for a year.**  But it doesn’t thrill my soul to be surrounded by all the unlovely storefronts and gas stations and such.  And it is very bland and un-special.  The city of Nashville has its own style and flair, but the suburbs of Nashville are Anytown, USA, homogenous and pandering to the consumer in all of us.  It would weary me to be surrounded by so much temptation in the form of Big Box Stores with Low Low Low Prices.  And finally, all that big old house has to be cleaned and cared for.  That’s a lot of floors to mop, a lot of windows to wash, and a lot of space to heat and cool.  So much space tends to lead to accumulation of clutter and stuff, and sometimes I kind of like the spartan lifestyle we’ve been forced to lead by having almost no free space in which to collect unneeded things.

For next time, the City Mouse!  Now I simply must go begin studying for exams.

*SO. JEALOUS. of the container garden.  I WANT A DAMN GARDEN, and one day, wherever we live, I will have one.  One that’s successful, and doesn’t just sprout up full of promise and stunning green and then immediately wither due to lack of sunlight.

**Just try to find a store in England open after 5pm.  Including the grocery.  Also, there are no WalMart or Target type places in England.  Some may call this a good thing, but that is when you don’t need to buy a bag of rice, a pack of pencils, some ponytail holders, and a birthday present for that girl who is having you over for drinks tonight and you forgot to get her something.  Because in England, that is four different stores, located in four different corners of the town, and all of them are open at dizzyingly complex and limited hours of the day, and half of them don’t take credit cards.  It was charming, and perhaps led to better working conditions for retail employees, but it took hours of careful planning and execution to do what Target lets you do in ten minutes.