Back to the City /WOOD
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<------------- Back to the City --------------
Did I look dismayed, I wonder, when Matthew announced that he had to rent an apartment in the city? Not just that he had to have one but it was practically a matter of life and death for him if an apartment in
I tried to look accepting, even borderline happy and excited. Inside, though, my heart was sinking. Don't get me wrong. I love the city. I had lived in Manhattan for over 30 years and was very content -- in fact, I never expected to leave. Until I did and became a country girl. That was a hard transition for a while. Why was I waking up with the sound of birds and not traffic in my ear? Would I lose all my city shine and become a country bumpkin who shopped at Walmart in sweat suits?
I tried to look accepting, even borderline happy and excited. Inside, though, my heart was sinking. Don't get me wrong. I love the city. I had lived in Manhattan for over 30 years and was very content -- in fact, I never expected to leave. Until I did and became a country girl. That was a hard transition for a while. Why was I waking up with the sound of birds and not traffic in my ear? Would I lose all my city shine and become a country bumpkin who shopped at Walmart in sweat suits?
The only saving grace was that I kept my city contacts: dentist, hairdresser, colorist. I met friends for dinner and stayed over in hotels -- over 125 hotels at last count. I still had my writing group that saved my sanity as I poured out the fragments of my life in short essays. The word I used to use to describe my city life was spontaneous -- everything I needed was within reach, from movies to restaurants to dry cleaners, from museums, stores... all were here for me.
How could I give up such a life of convenience and pleasure?
Gradually, though, against all odds, I grew to love my country life. A river was right outside the door. I gardened, I lounged on our large porch, I snuggled into the comfy living room sofa with tea and a book in hand, the sound of the wood burning stove humming in my ears.
When I would get home from a day or two in the city I would nest in my house, never wanting to leave except for going to the gym. I didn’t mind, much, that the closest movie theater was a 48 mile round trip from my house (I had Netflix), that the closest cleaner (36 miles round trip) never pressed Matthew’s shirts properly, that the best restaurant was 40 miles away (we almost never went there) and the next best restaurant was 14 miles away. Nothing was around the corner.
But so many things about my new life suited me. I was able to finish writing my book (still unpublished, but so what!); I started an antique business, which I love and would never have done had I stayed in the city. Matthew and I cook all the time and have dinner parties at least twice a month. We acquired a dog. And for the last 5 years we didn’t have to commute to the country every weekend as we had done for 22 years. We could stay in one place, or not, but most of the time we were home, in our house, and we weren’t packing and unpacking bags or wondering in which residence we left what piece of clothing. Life has been simpler in many ways.
In short, I’ve been happy. And I’ve learned to be happy without the hustle and bustle of city life; I gave up spontaneity for something I never thought I would crave, and that is peace and quiet with time to think, with nowhere pressing to go to more often than not.
So why have I found myself in the madness of NYC again? Because my husband demanded that we be here. He couldn’t exist one more day without a foothold in the city. I knew that he wanted to come back; he kept talking about it. But I ignored him. I thought it was a phase that he would grow out of.
But Matthew was lured and seduced by the cacophony of the streets shouting at him, come back, come back. Are we going in different directions or simply taking different routes to the same destination? I didn’t know the answer to that yet.
How we came to look at apartments in the first place was all Matthew’s doing. At a party a few months ago the conversation veered towards city talk and Matthew mentioned that he would love to get an apartment again. One of the guests chimed in that he had a friend who was a real estate agent. Matthew took the number and, unbeknownst to me, called to make an appointment.
He didn’t tell me about the appointment until we were in the city the following week. That’s when that look of dismay might have flashed across my face. Don’t be negative, don’t be negative, I told myself. What’s the worst thing that could happen? Many people would want to be in my position, looking for a pied-a-tier.
I’m pretty excited about this, he crowed. Aren’t you?
Oh, yes, great. Deep breath, deep breath, keep cool.
At the agent’s office we filled out paperwork and talked about what we were looking for -- small one bedroom, bright, nice building, takes dogs. Were my eyes glazing over yet? Whew, keep it cool, I told myself.
The agent took us to see 4 apartments that same day, none of which I could ever live in for one reason or another: too dark, too small, mid-renovation, horrible building. At our price level the apartments also were missing a key element that I thought necessary for even a modicum of elegant living – an entrance way. All the one-bedrooms we had seen opened directly into the living room from the door.
Two weeks later, with a break for Thanksgiving, we were back. The agent showed us 4 more apartments, and as I stood in the last one, on West 86th street, I thought ‘I could live here.’ It had lovely details, crown moldings, high ceilings, and a charming little entrance way. It was painted beautifully with creamy pale yellow walls and white ceilings; the bathroom had a window as did the tiny kitchen.
At the agent’s office we filled out paperwork and talked about what we were looking for – small one bedroom, bright, nice building, takes dogs. Were my eyes glazing over yet? Whew, keep it cool, I told myself.
The agent took us to see 4 apartments that same day, none of which I could ever live in for one reason or another: too dark, too small, mid-renovation, horrible building. At our price level the apartments also were missing a key element that I thought necessary for even a modicum of elegant living – an entrance way. All the one-bedrooms we had seen opened directly into the living room from the door.
Two weeks later, with a break for Thanksgiving, we were back. The agent showed us 4 more apartments, and as I stood in the last one, on West 86th street, I thought ‘I could live here.’ It had lovely details, crown moldings, high ceilings, and a charming little entrance way. It was painted beautifully with creamy pale yellow walls and white ceilings; the bathroom had a window as did the tiny kitchen.
It was light and quiet, facing a row of brownstones and not the street. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The price was right, too. And it was a great building, pre-war, immaculate, and only a block away from Central Park.
I said yes. And just like that I had broken through my self-imposed exile. We moved in officially the week of Christmas when the storage company delivered our old apartment to our new one and we spent days unpacking. Some things came ‘home’ with us to the country like lots of art that just didn’t fit in this smaller space; some things were tossed (why we ever packed that rusted casserole dish is a mystery.) The furniture seems too big for the space; in fact it seems downright wrong. But for now we will live with it.
Okay, it is nice to come back to the apartment during the day and not to have to check out of a hotel room at 12 noon. It’s great to be just a subway ride away from most anything we want to do and not have to plan a special trip into the city to see a show or catch an independent movie.
Yet, I still feel as if I’m playing house and that this apartment is not really ours. And I’m still not sure that I want to be a city person again. Matthew, however, is as happy as he can be. We went to two museums last Sunday and he was crowing about it all the way home…to the country.
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WOOD by Leslie Rutkin
Two people are standing on a lawn looking across at a wood
pile, which is why I notice them as I drive by. The wood pile is
huge, one to envy if you are into that sort of thing. It is high and
long, with perfectly cut logs stacked in even
rows. There must be two cords of wood stacked there. I would like to stop at that wood pile and walk around it. It is
the antithesis of my own pile which is more
haphazardly stacked and, in some places, in danger of spilling onto the
driveway when a precariously positioned
log is removed to feed a fire.
I
like the precision and beauty of a wood pile and I admire the energy it
takes to create one. I imagine that the owner of that
house has a log splitter and a chain saw and he ventured into the woods behind his house to choose fallen trees that
were perfectly dried out. He had to saw large limbs into manageable pieces right there in the woods
and then load them onto his pickup. Back home
each large limb had to be split and sawed into 18” lengths. The wood
then had to be stacked, piece by
piece, hundreds of pieces. All I do is stack the wood that has
been dumped at the top of my driveway by the wood guy.
Matthew tried
collecting his own one year, driving deep into a friends property. His
back was out for
weeks after that. Our wood guy does all the work except stacking,
although we have an alternate wood guy who will stack and he doesn’t even
charge extra for it.
Yet
there is a certain pleasure in seeing the jumbled pile of logs slowly
diminish and reappear in an organized
stack. I get my gloves from the garage, take off the fleece vest, for
in a minute my body will heat up
from the exertion. I bend over, pick up a log in each hand, walk four
steps and neatly lay the logs
down on the ground in a row, making sure the ends line up. All it takes
is one log askew and the whole
pile will be crooked. I do this dozens and dozens of times. In the
meantime, Matthew is loading up the cart with wood and creating a pile by the hot tub on the porch. We are done in about 45 minutes,
one cord of wood.
In
two weeks we will do this again, and again
in another two weeks. There will be 5 cords in all which will take us
through to the spring, enough
wood to feed the fire in the outdoor hot tub with its wood stove inside
the tub, and the indoor wood
stove, which creates enough heat in the house so that we hardly ever put
the thermostat
up above 60 all winter.
Our
wood pile has moved from place to place around the house, which has to
do more with our relationships
with our neighbors rather than any master plan of our own. At the moment we are not speaking with either neighbor and
vice versa. We used to be able to have our wood guy drive down one of their driveways, both of
which border our property in the back, and dump the wood right in our back yard. We would stack
it there, either on the right or the left of the property. Our driveway is in front of our house and
not accessible to the back yard. It was very nice of the neighbors to let us
access our property through their property.
Now that we are not speaking to each other, the
wood guy
has to bring our wood to the top of our driveway. I don’t really mind
this at all. When the wood was in
the back of the property we would leave it sometimes for weeks before
we got to stacking. Now we have to stack right away or else we
can’t get into the garage.
Maybe I should tell you why
we are not speaking to the neighbors. There are three house very close to one another. We are in the middle. The
neighbor on the left, about five years ago, was complaining that the smoke from our hot tub stove was
wafting into her son’s room at night and he
couldn’t breath. We bought a taller chimney, we put a crook in the
chimney, but smoke tends to go
where it wants to go depending on the way the breezes blow. We started
fires in the daytime when the
kids were out of the house. Then at a party at our home, the neighbor
said to Matthew that he had better do something about the
smoke, or else.
Matthew stopped speaking to
her for a year. She couldn’t understand it. She started pursuing him, actually stalking him when she spied him in
Walmart, shouting that she was a good person. Matthew refused to talk to her. She started shouting at
him from her driveway. I finally called to say that since neither family was moving we were going
to have to agree to disagree and please stop
shouting at my husband from your driveway. A few weeks later fence
components appeared in the
neighbor’s driveway. A year later the husband put up the fence. It’s
been great. Except now we can’t use their driveway as a conduit to our
backyard.
The neighbor to the right of us told us that the
wood guy could use their driveway and he did and left our wood on the left side
of our property, in the back. Then we started an antique business, and suddenly our driveway was filled with all kinds of
furniture, odd pieces of ‘vintage’ metal parts,
old barrels – well, I guess it wasn’t pretty. Maryann started murmuring
things under her breath whenever
she walked past. Then our tree fell down and Matthew began cutting it
up at 7 in the morning, before
the sun got too strong. And Bill started shouting at Matthew to cut out
the fucking sawing so early in
the morning. And then their fence went up. That was great. All this privacy and we didn’t have to pay
for it.
And that’s why
our wood is dumped at the top of the driveway.
Before
we bought a hot tub we never thought about wood very much. In fact, we
never thought about a hot tub
either. Except for that fateful night when our friends invited us over
to try out their new hot tub. It
was the day before Christmas, it was a cold and crisp and snowy day. And
we were soaking in steamy 104
degree water. We could look up and see stars, and the snowflakes kissed our shoulders and we sank deeper
into the warmth. We were wearing bathing suits, outdoors, in December.
A few weeks later we ordered
our own hot tub, all the way from Washington state. It came in 20 boxes and the instructions said that two people could
assemble the tub in 8 hours. Four days later,
and with almost no fighting, we had a hot tub. It’s made of wood and
it’s constructed like a barrel.
It’s called a snorkel stove because the heat comes from the wood burning
stove submerged right into the
water with the stove pipe jutting up like a snorkel.
That
was our introduction to wood. Or rather the need for wood to burn in
our hot tub. Twelve years later
we are still in love with our hot tub, but we are also 12 years older,
and keeping a wood burning hot
tub hot is no picnic in the winter. It’s like a needy lover who demands
constant attention – feed me,
feed me, it says; keep me hot, add more wood. The hot tub has about another 3 years of life to it, which is when the wood
starts to rot out; and then we’re getting a nice electric spa.
The hot tub somehow led us
to want an indoor wood burning stove. After all, we now had so much wood. And a cozy fire in the house would be
nice. We bought a sweet little stove that works
so well that our oil bills went down. We only use the stove from
October to April, and then the
chimney sweep (yes there are still chimney sweeps) comes and cleans it
out.
When
Matthew and I travel we always comment on the bits of trees lying on
the ground as if these twigs and branches were great
works of art. ‘That would make great kindling’ we say. At the beginning of our hot tub days we actually collected
kindling wherever we were – friend’s houses, day trips. Once we loaded up the back seat of the car
while in the Berkshires. We don’t do that any
more. Matthew has learned how to chop logs into matchstick lengths
which catch fire in an instant. We
have added to our vocabulary the word "maul," which is a very heavy axe
like implement. Swing it the
right way and it will cut a log in half. I’ve done it. It’s
thrilling. Except when I pulled my shoulder out of joint and had to have
five weeks of physical therapy.
There
is so much more to tell, but I have to go now. There’s a load of wood
in my driveway and I’m itching to
get my hands on it.
