May 11, 2024

In The City

Saturday morning began with a Nespresso coffee on the couch with my best friend. As usual, our dog Kilo was rushing us along so she could eat her breakfast, but we were having none of it. We just wanted to soak in a quiet start to a day off together.

Today, we had a couple of early errands to run, involving both of our vehicles. My SUV needed to have an emergency warning light checked and the car inspected. My wife’s SUV had a computer error, which originated in the factory before they shipped it to the U.S. from overseas. We had to take her car to a dealership in Raleigh to get the software updated at noon. Her car needed to be inspected, too.

I took a shower and then we drove to a car repair place in Wilson. They checked the computer in my car and told us the car just needed an oil change, even though I didn’t drive it very much. When I lived in Texas and commuted to work, I had to fill up my gas tank several times a week. But living out here, I think I bought gas once every three or four weeks, depending on how much fishing I had done.

We had the oil changed in my SUV, but they could not complete the state inspection because their computer system was down. I would have to take it later in the week. While they were looking at the vehicle, my wife and I stood at a table inside the waiting area, where she studied and I knocked out a writing session. I was pleased to leave the place with my writing done for the day.

We grabbed a quick snack on the way back home, where we changed vehicles and then drove into a Raleigh dealership, stopping in Bailey to fill the tank with gas. While my wife was fueling her car, a young man rode up on a bicycle with a small gas can. He looked disheveled and distraught as he struggled to open the can, dropping a handful of coins on the ground. The whole time, he was muttering, either conversing with himself, or perhaps someone he was seeing. The whole situation felt off. My wife stopped fueling her car, and we got inside and drove off.

The dealership took almost two hours to fix the computer and inspect the car, but I edited this morning’s writing piece and my wife completed several practice questions for her OB-GYN rotation exam. The computer update to the car was free, and the inspection cost $13.60, which was the smallest amount we had ever paid at a dealership for anything.

On the way back to Sims, we stopped in Knightdale to eat lunch at the Saltgrass Steakhouse. My wife had a soup and salad while I munched on a small ribeye. She ate a few bites of my steak and we chopped up half of it to take home to the dogs. After we finished eating, we stopped at a TJ Maxx to buy some toys for the dogs. Kilo had been dragging around her dog bed and blanket lately, so my wife wanted to pick up a rope toy she could play tug with. Kilo, the smallest of our dogs, was vicious at the game with her Malinois bloodline, and I knew I would never want this dog chewing on my leg. She was so strong.

After visiting two car places, driving in dreadful weekend traffic, and seeing so many people, I was ready to get back to the country, where only two cars traveled down the dirt road that led to our house, mine and my wife’s.

When we arrived home, I felt tired from the overstimulation and rested on the floor with the dogs. After dozing off for a few minutes, I made a coffee, took it outside, and sat down in the sun with my wife. The light on my face felt good, but after twenty minutes, we both got hot. We went inside to cool off.

Later in the evening, my wife invited me back outside, telling me I should probably bring a sweatshirt. I thought she was kidding, but the temperature had cooled considerably. Later, I went back inside the house to grab a hoodie and some thick socks. I didn’t remember having such cool nights last May, but I appreciated the break from the heat.

My wife and I sat outside with a couple of cold beers, talking and catching up. We watched the baby wrens taking food from the father and still felt amazed at how the father carried off the chick’s excrement to keep the nest clean. Wrens sure had parenthood figured out.

While sitting outside, we looked up and saw a passenger airplane heading north. I wondered where all the people were going. Throughout the night, every time I looked up, there was an identical plane headed down the same flight path. My wife and I joked it was the same plane, and we were all caught in a time portal. The joke went on throughout the night and somehow got funnier each time.

Before it got dark, we took a walk into the woods. My wife was waving her hands in karate-like motions to knock down any potential spider webs that blocked our path. I laughed uncontrollably when she walked face first into a web, her arms flailing at triple the speed of her previously feigned motions. At the creek, we stopped to watch all the insects dancing on the water’s surface. I poked around the creek’s bank with a long stick, causing frogs to appear out of the mud and jump into the water.

It was getting dark, and the forest felt even cooler than the deck. We walked on a trail that circled back to the grove. When we arrived near the feeding area, my eyes caught the movement of a deer walking in the grove, just inside the tree line. We froze in our tracks. In the dim, dusky light, we saw another deer standing about forty yards in front of us, centered in the open lane that cut between the rows of pines. The deer froze, too, watching us carefully. We didn’t move or make any sounds. We just stared at each other for a couple of minutes before the doe walked off and disappeared into the forest. It was a really gratifying experience.

While showering, I thought about my time today in the city. There were so many people everywhere, and so many cars on the roads, jamming the streets with traffic. And the noise, it was everywhere, and outside of my control. The sounds of car engines, honking horns, televisions, radios, people talking, and more. They all compounded until they felt deafening and dissonant. While there were noises in the forest, they always slowed things down in my mind and made me feel calm. The city had the exact opposite effect.

I knew not everyone could or wanted to live in isolation in the woods. But I couldn’t help but know a secret from having lived in both the city and the country. In the city, I thought I was relaxed, and I was never aware of how the people and noise affected me. But after living outside of this boisterous environment, I understood it was exerting pressure on me the whole time. I just didn’t know it. Now, I knew that living out in the country, where I saw more deer than people, and heard more birdsongs than television shows, was the life for me. It gave me a space to get grounded, to be creative, and to discover the happiness that came with a quiet, natural lifestyle.