Country Mouse

I hate to come back glum from a two-week blogging hiatus, and I promise to make it up to you tomorrow with at least one picture of a newborn baby, but the discontent that's growing inside me again needs some leg room.

I think I've said before, and I will very likely say again, that I'm glad we live in the city for now. It's brought us closer to friends and family and entertainment and great food. For me, since I tend to fear anything I haven't done before, it's also killed off a whole bundle of fears. But the last two years have also made it clear that I really belong somewhere else.

Lately, "somewhere else" is a place where my peace and conscience aren't disturbed, respectively, by footsteps above and the awareness of another life below. Where the house next door is not so close that I can hear the humming of their air conditioner and my own lights are reflected brilliantly off their white siding. Where strangers don't stand a few feet from my open windows and smoke. And we can bring home nice things and not have to even think about whether they'll be clearly visible from outside the building, and if they are, whether someone will try to steal them. Where we don't have to close the windows next to the couch when we watch TV, to mute the sound of traffic. And I don't have to think about what day of the week it is before deciding where to park the car outside my own home. Where on Tuesday mornings I can do the laundry and shake the bathroom rugs on the back step without worrying about running into a neighbor while unwashed, pajamaed, and braless.

Right now my perfect somewhere else, the somewhere else where I belong, is a place where sometimes I can feel alone.