Let that rural fantasy remain distant
I just went on a beach vacation with my husband, that I halfplanned and then almost forgot, after I forgot to plan anything fun, or anything at all, all summer. It was the kind of vacation you might still cancel as you manoeuvre through the door with six backpacks and a Whole Foods bag stuffed with towels, leaving behind errands, laundry, and unknown to you right then, a swimsuit and sunblock. It’s only when you get there, driving long, empty arcs of country road from town — sunblock acquired — to beach, that the fields and sky and lake quietly absolve you from your regular life.
“You know …” I said, my head out the window, hair like machine-spun cotton candy, and that was it, the conversational obsession, for the rest of the trip: What would it be like to move here?
What could we get if we traded our house in Toronto — where my neighbours’ cute toddler yells through the backyard fence “I can’t see you Kate! Kate, I can’t see you!” — for a farmhouse, and more to the point, for land?
The rural fantasy is a gentler but more expensive version of having an affair, so you can play at being someone else; it’s the strongest intoxicant, when you’ve finally decided on something, to consider giving it up. The self isn’t static; other versions are always there, latent, and one of mine drives a pick- up truck.
Everyone, I think, has a natural habitat, and despite growing up in the suburbs and living in a city ever since, I’m sure that mine is the country: my best memories and rightest feelings are reading uninterrupted for twelve hours at a cottage; anything to do with summer camp; spending weeks in cut-offs and decaying twin braids, the permanent weekend-ness of it all that led me to a no-job career and a generally delayed adulthood. Every stressy city person, suddenly relieved of something they didn’t know they were carrying, exhales as they fall out of the rented SUV, highway-hot and reborn, but when I get somewhere with just trees and water, I feel like, yeah. This could be forever.
Living in a city invites delusions of grandeur, like the “Of course I’ll live here one day” feeling I get when I find myself in many-mill mansions currently available to me only as venues for private parties sponsored by alcohol brands, even though living like that is not what I want, ever — too much house, and the attendant lifestyle is bad for marriage, families, the environment and the spirit — but experiencing someone else’s entirely different circumstances is what cities are for.
Delusions of simplicity, on the other hand, inform the country fantasy. The pieces of city life that both encourage and soothe urban complications don’t exist in the country, so it’s easy to extrapolate a contained, pastoral heaven, but what you get by living there is easily matched by what you give up: it’s so much cheaper, but that much harder to make enough money. Winter isn’t shorter three hours north or northeast, and I’d probably have to shovel. Driving somewhere to buy groceries is a novelty, but nothing I actually want to do, especially with twice-weekly organics delivery and markets that sell the good salt and probiotics on my streetcar route.
Back home, aching for the better air I’ve been breathing, I get how city-spoiled I am (even in Toronto, which still doesn’t have adequate breakfast delivery, street style or self-confidence).
I mean, I refused to move to the far-west end, where most of my friends live, because it was too far from my doctor, dentist, therapist; considering the future — where I’ll become more aware of my proximity to good schools, hospitals and close friends, and not just my favourite movie theatre and luxury-hotel lobbies — the country fantasy-life’s own complications and demands, beyond watching the sun setting over endless green-turning-gold, reveal themselves in full.
There’s no practicality to the fantasy, except for the romance — which is practical, if you have an expansive idea of what life is for.