City Mouse and Country Mouse, Part II

This morning, we woke at a reasonable hour, put on decent clothes, and walked twenty minutes to church.  Last night, The Professor fancied a beer and we had none in the house, so he walked three minutes to Whole Foods to pick up a 12-pack of Red Stripe.  A couple of days ago we had no milk for cereal, so on my hurried (late for class) five minute drive to school, I stopped two minutes down the road at the Winn Dixie to grab a cream cheese muffin and mini bottle of Simply Orange, while The Professor put Jack in the stroller, Virgil on the leash, and meandered two blocks to the tiny local bakery for a blueberry bar to go with his homemade coffee.  Many are the mornings when we are out of coffee, and he makes an even shorter one block walk in the opposite direction to either one of two local coffee shops for a cup of brew.  Though I’m driving these days, when not hugely pregnant I usually throw on a backpack and a helmet and cycle fifteen minutes to school.  My route takes me through a stunning city park, bustling with walkers and joggers and cellphone talkers at virtually any daylight hour.

The houses we pass on these jaunts are, for the most part, charming and unique, with the occasional falling-down-wreck to lend authenticity to the neighborhood.  No single developer lined these up like uniformed soldiers in a master plan, and yet the jumble of designs, ages, lot sizes, and stages of repair yield a pleasing whole.   They are close together, meaning each dweller can hear his neighbor clear his throat in the morning, but also leading to a much reduced impact on the environment, and an almost aggressively friendly neighborliness that I have never known in all of my suburban living (I know more neighbors here than I did after five years in NC.  Even the Winn Dixie checkout ladies know me).  Most have wee gardens in the front, riotous with tumbling blooms in this spring season, limited space notwithstanding.  Several streets widen to allow for a small green park in the center median.  Most of these, including one large children’s playground blocks from our home, are maintained and paid for by volunteer homeowners.  Friendly signs ask dog-walkers to clean up after their dogs, and tied to them are plastic grocery bags, for convenient compliance.

From our house we can walk to two grocery stores, the library, two coffee shops, the zoo, three children’s playgrounds, a handful of hair salons, a big city park, untold amazing restaurants, and a boggling array of stores selling clothing, books, knicknacks, flowers, antiques, tourist junk, cupcakes, pralines, specially made body lotions – you name it.  It is less than ten miles to the French Quarter, the river walk, the casinos, and most of the festivals that this city throws every weekend.  If we don’t feel like driving into the city, we can traverse that ten miles in a streetcar for a dollar and a quarter, something I may try during my summer job this year, mostly because I want The Professor to have the car in case I go into labor and need picked up from work.  Which points out another thing in this city’s favor – we have only one car, and do not want for another, which almost makes up for the difference we pay in monthly rent.

Ah, but all is not paradise.  We’ve been here less than a year, and even in this very upscale neighborhood where most houses sell for $300-400,000  a year minimum, our car has been broken into.  If we ever wanted to own a house here, we would be paying top dollar for fairly limited space, since as prices go down, crime goes way, way up, and only millions will buy you the kind of space that my parents enjoy in suburbia.  We have to leave the front porch light on all night, for safety, since the guy across the street had his door kicked in and house tossed (in the middle of weekday!) We have to be careful to close our blinds at night when the lights come on, so potential thieves can’t case our house.  Even though we have little to steal, we have to be very careful to protect ourselves from unwanted criminal attention.  The crime in this area is petty theft, for the most part, but still we put a Club on our old car every night, just in case, and I carry pepper spray to and from school, even in the daylight.  At least once a month at my university, we receive a crime report of a student or students who were held up at gunpoint mere blocks from school, sometimes as worryingly early as 10pm.

Jack cannot play outside our house.  The backyard is full of city trash, even though the owners and I frequently clear the grass of rusty screws, broken glass, and other little bits of dangerous junk.  Still it floats up from the lower layers of soil, constantly renewing the litter layer on the top.  The front yard is tiny, recently landscaped (read: two year olds crushing feet NOT WELCOME!), and feet from our street, a busy enough thoroughfare that I do not feel comfortable letting Jack play there without my being stationed by the road.  He spends a lot of time outside at one of our nearby parks, and that lets him do a lot of interacting with a wide array of kids.  But as he grows older he will not be able to learn to ride his bike on our street, or walk unsupervised to a friend’s house.  The day he learns to get out of the front screen door is the day I officially begin having daily heart attacks, certain he’ll be out and under the wheels of a car before I hear the door bang to.  Or – and this would be worse – that he’ll just disappear.

We have to fight for a parallel parking space near our house, and risk a ding or crushed wing mirror from the busy city traffic.  We look out our multiple windows and see a fence on one side, and the siding of the neighbor house on the other, both less than 2 feet from the window.  If we open the doors and windows for ventilation, we can hear our neighbor’s annoyingly loud AC unit blasting away.  Sometimes the bars and coffee shops a block away host bands, and then there is little peace in our house ’til the wee hours.  And the shops nearby, though charming, are paying high rent to be in their city location, meaning everything costs more.  Usually if we have to buy anything that isn’t groceries, we get in the car and drive half an hour over the toll bridge – to suburbia.  And I won’t even tell you how long we have to drive to get to wilderness.  Let’s just say we won’t be doing much camping and hiking when we live here, things that I miss.

I’ll say that the times in my life when I have felt the most personal fulfillment and general day-to-day happiness are the years that I have lived in a walkable city or town.  I tend to feel trapped and bored in a suburb, and annoyed by the amount of time I spend in a car.  This may have to do, however, with the fact that I’ve only ever lived in a city as a student or waitress/traveler.  My life now and in those previous times in cities (Sydney, Australia and Stratford-upon-Avon, England, if you’re curious) was happier too because of the flexibility and fulfillment I get from being a nerd student.  I don’t know how happy I’d be with this schedule but living in my parents’ neighborhood.  It’s a curious question.

Of course, there is a third alternative, and that is country livin’.  I’ve never done that, though, so I couldn’t tell you how that would make me feel.  Traipsing through fields with the dog off leash, tending to a huge sprawling garden, and maintaining a huge pantry full of canned tomatoes, homemade jams, and applesauce appeals to me.  I’d love for Jack to skin his knees climbing trees, get doused in the crick, learn to swim in a lake and to drive on country roads.  I’d hate to have to plan huge excursions to get to the library or grocery or school, or to see other people.

Anyway.  There you have it.  Our internal debate.  Internal and pointless, since we live where we live and we can afford what we can afford depending on the jobs we will one day have, God willing and the crick don’t rise.