Suzy Says

I love to visit my brother and sister, who live in the country, though I can’t imagine living there all the time. Being somewhere you can’t hail a cab tends to make me nervous. They live more than five miles from their village, and when you get there, this is all it is:

Post office
Hardware store
General store (which rocks), where you can also buy necessities like gas for your car and propane.

That’s it. So if you run out of milk and the store is closed, you better hope your neighbors have some. But there are definitely nice things about living in such an isolated place:

1. You can blast your stereo as loud as you want and no-one complains, because there’s no-one close enough to hear it.

2. You can’t hear other people (or their stereos) at all, just the wind in the trees, the birds, and the crickets and frogs (I live with people above and below me, so this is big for me).

3. You can let your cats out in perfect safety, which also means no litter boxes.

4. You can sit in your garden in the sun, or lie in your hammock reading, with hummingbirds buzzing around.

On the other hand, you have to drive 45 minutes to get to the closest Safeway, DMV, etc. And things happen that would never happen in an urban setting:

1. Waking up to discover corpses neatly placed beside your bed (mice, moles, bats, birds), prizes from your cats’ nocturnal hunting. Interesting fact: the cats never eat the moles, because their fur grosses cats out. Something about how it grows the wrong way. But they still kill them anyway. My sis and her husband have a corpse rule: whoever finds it first deals with it. I would immediately develop even worse eyesight than I have now.

2. Waking up to discover that there was frost last night, and you’re out of firewood, which is how you heat your house, so you have to go and chop wood and then build the fire and then jump back into bed until it’s warm enough to venture out from under the covers.

3. Waking up to discover that deer have eaten everything in your garden. Country dwellers do not find deer the gentle, charming Bambis that city folks do. Rather, they see them as relentless, evil landscape destroyers. Apparently deer don’t nibble a few leaves here and there, they ravage everything unless your garden is draped in deer netting.

4. Waking up to discover that it has rained in the night, and you left your car window rolled down, so your (red Italian leather) wallet is soaked. My sister leaves her keys in the car, and often leaves her wallet on the front seat of the car so she won’t forget it, so that’s how that happened. Not only does she never lock her car doors, she never locks her house doors. The house doors don’t even have locks. Can you imagine?

So when you wake up in the country, you never know what you’ll find.