Problem We Do Not Have

Used to live exactly one block from here, for four years, and before that two blocks from here, for six years, for a total of ten, among many poor folks trying to make a dollar. The rapper Nelly grew up on my street while I lived there. Look, rent was $255 a month and my income was $500 a month and stayed that way for two years, and my landlord (owned both buildings) never ever raised my rent from the starting rent because he wanted to keep a tenant whose checks did not bounce.

I laugh sometimes at life in those close-set apartment buildings. Cats sang in chorus in the back alley and woke us all, and tenants on the second and third floors raised their windows, screamed swearwords, and pelted the cats with shoes. Summer barbecues smoked on every fire escape and the party hosts gave away their ages by the music they were blasting. Once a crew removed my fire escape (I guess to replace it) while I was at work and it was the only way to enter my apartment because I had police-locked and chained the other door. The workers still there put a ladder up to the second story and told me to climb it. I was wearing a skirt but also pettipants, and blessed myself for wearing pettipants and being fit. I was in my late 30s then.

I got very good at -- right in this spot in this photo -- darting at top speed through an alley in order to cut five minutes from my walk home. Then I moved to the Divine Property. These days the old neighborhood has been upscaled and landscaped and at night the alley is floodlit. They've even put benches along that walkway to make it seem parklike, and plants in planters to make it pretty. But apparently people want plants badly enough to steal them. I now live where there are plants galore and we worry they'll be eaten by deer.

Driving (Me Nuts)

2002 Buick Century

"Stop! There's a stoplight!" "Mom, I see it." "I thought you weren't going to stop." "Mom, I know a red light means stop." "But you weren't slowing down." "Mom, I don't ride the brake. I step on the brake when we get closer to the light." "You scared me. I thought you weren't going to stop." "The state of Missouri thinks I can drive, Mom." "But you don't know this place or where the stoplights are!" "Mom, I have eyes, I can see the stoplights. I am not stupid." "I'm not saying you're stupid, I'm saying you don't know how to drive here." "I've been driving for 40 years, Mom." "Now the light is going to turn green." "Yes,  I know." "And when it turns green, you go." "Yes, Mom, I know that." "I'm just trying to help, I don't want a smash-up." "There won't be any smash-up." "I worry. I don't want to wreck the car" [2002 Buick Century,  44,000 miles]. "I won't wreck the car." "Now turn here; look both ways. No, no, not here; I didn't want to turn here, I meant the next one." [Stony silence from driver.] "Now here comes a car; watch out, there's a car!" (Gasps, clutches car seat.) "Mom, I see the car." "It was coming right at us!" "No, it was in its lane." "I don't want us to get hit!" "Mom, I think (laughing) you might be a control freak." "Oh, you talk so nasty to me. You make me cry. You cut me to the heart" (weeping). "That doesn't work on me anymore, Mom." "You called me a freak (weeping) and you called me something else before."[Thirty seconds of stony silence.] "Now we're at 56th. In two more blocks we'll be at 58th."

Beauty and Surprise

Underside

Top side

Beauty is why I live here; I can't thrive without it. While living in a basement, with a job in a basement, and getting back and forth on the subway, I subsisted on books and pictures, and in other unpromising circumstances clung to the glitter of junk jewelry or a worn-out cassette tape in my Sony Walkman playing and replaying The Mamas and the Papas, or Mozart as performed by St.-Martin-in-the-Fields. I lived in and left cities with little to no beauty, or none I could see; I didn't live in the areas with views, vistas, or charm. Over a long period of time this taught me to look for beauty in the smallest things and unlikely places.

I didn't know it, but I was starved for surprises and gifts as well as beauty. I went to work, paid rent. My weekly budget left me $6 in disposable income. Walking neighborhood streets for exercise, I did not look at people, or houses, or to the right or left; these were cities in which if you did that they called the police, believing you were casing their houses.

For the past seven days here the sun did not show. Still, the weather was reasonably mild and I shuffled through the gray woods, with no birds in them, my eye catching on nothing but boring beige-ish inedible parasitic-on-deadwood fungi that all looked alike until I turned them over and saw they had wonderful petticoats.

Keeping Down Appearances

On warm mornings I wear my pajamas to walk to the mailbox; if it's cooler I'll sling on my bathrobe. If it's night and I'm throwing a mouse's corpse into the meadow, what's the problem if I do it in my briefs and Maidenform? In winter I work outside wearing ludicrously paint-stained sweatshirts, hunter-orange stocking caps, and holey gloves. If my hiking clothes are possibly poison-ivied or full of ticks or chiggers or mud, I'll strip down on the stoop before entering the house. Can't do that in the city.

In the city I had to comb my hair and put on a bra and clean clothes that matched before I left my  apartment building, or children would point and laugh. And I amused  my fellow urban dwellers with my white T-shirts that somehow almost always turned a faint pink, broadcasting the fact that I did my own laundry and was a moron. Heck, I wasn't throwing away good T-shirts because they turned a little bit pink!

I like living here because it allows for appearance improvisation. There's no sense washing my hair if I'm cramming on a ball cap to clean the garage that day. But then if I must go to the hardware store for something, I'll pretend I don't have greasy hat hair, and  -- I don't feel judged, because most everyone looks just like me. Except middle-class moms, who put on yoga clothes in the morning and wear them everywhere, dawn to dusk, because from any one point it'd be a 15-mile trip to go home and change. See, we have our reasons.

Except on Saturday night and on Sunday. Then, if you're gonna see people, you have to clean up. Paradoxically, those are the times that city people get to be slobs.

In the Broccoli Hills

Gratuitious butterflies. All we have to do is watch the Pearl Crescent in its favorite poison ivy or the Great Spangled Fritillary sharing nectar with a bee on a butterfly bush.  June to me is the peak of the year, the pinnacle of earthly beauty, and as I sit here ready to go to the farmer's market I see hundreds of acres of hills, bright green (called by gardener Demetrius "broccoli hills"; he'd say "Look: broccoli hills, Bun")  and every inch loaded with lives like these for the watching. Right now a bunny is eyeing the unmown grass and eyeing me to see if he or she can get away with eating it. Bunnies are many around here this year. Yesterday I saw a baby bunny too young to be scared of me. Gratuitous: Free! Revel in them; life is not forever!

Today is the seventh anniversary of the Divinebunbun's Rugged Rural Missouri blog. Thank you for following along and sharing my joys. In the city I lived with loud nightly drunken arguments and screaming, domestic battles, cop cars, boom cars that woke us all, drug houses with very irritable people just outside, and bullet holes in my car's windshield. And now. . .

What City People Eat

Today I went to an urban business lunch, a buffet serving grilled chicken breast halves (about 6 ounces each), pasta with vegetables (pretty good), salad, and rolls. My table seated 8, seven women and one man, and I surveyed their plates and saw:

1. Chicken, pasta, salad, roll.
2. Only chicken.
3. Only salad.
4. Only chicken.
5. Nothing but a nutrition bar she unwrapped and cut with a knife and fork and ate like it was a meal.
6. Chicken, salad.
7. Only salad.
8. Chicken, pasta, salad, and, going home in the car, still hungry (because no one takes seconds) a package of peanut butter crackers, and at home, blackberry pudding.

Guess which one I am. Made me wonder, where is this country going?

The White Carnation Story

I've been shy about it for four years, but now I'll tell you I'm a cancer survivor who was cured but must visit the cancer center quarterly to get checked up on. It's a lovely building but the waiting room is soccer-field size and always jam-packed with cancer patients, all kinds, all stages (except kids) and their families. Our number always appalls me. In the elevator there I have been surprised to meet friends who were coming or going. In the waiting area a nurse rings a brass bell when somebody goes into remission, and we all applaud and cheer.

But the hundreds of people, just the number, depresses and grieves me, and it's not a happy place, and I'm always alone when most people aren't, and the water cooler is always empty, and although I like the staff (they saved my life) I dread going there. Did you know there's a national magazine just for cancer patients? They've got lots of copies in case you want to take one home (I don't).

My appointment was March 14. There was no room for me to sit. I was standing with my back to a wall when a group of very young women came in, all giggling and whatnot. They were college girls. "We're such-and-such sorority," one of them said, and they shouldered through the crowd handing everyone a white carnation. I got one too.

Very surprised, I said, "Thanks.  Do you want a donation, a dollar for your club or something?"

"Oh no," said the girl. "We're just handing out flowers."

"Why?" I asked, because this had never happened before.

"To cheer you up," she said.

I had to turn away because I about burst into tears right there.

Carefully I brought the carnation home and although its edges are brown now I keep it because it reminds me: No kindness is ever wasted. As Scouts we had to go sing Christmas carols in nursing homes, and in school collect for clothing drives, and in college serve at soup kitchens, and do things for other people not so fortunate as we. I used to think it was useless and embarrassing, and that sending cards or visiting was tedious, and couldn't see the point of calling to say hi, and very often I have thought my kindness and good intentions wasted, that I had cheated myself, that nothing had been achieved. I bet those sorority girls thought "Now this is such a stupid idea. I'm soooo embarrassed. This can't help anybody." Now that I'm on the other side, I see: Oh no; none of that is true at all.

She's an Easy Target

Driving on the highway I saw a woman my age walking alone on the road shoulder, an unusual sight. She was hiking. Before thinking anything else I thought, "There's an easy target."

Then I thought: That's what I look like.

I go on solo hikes all the time, and take daily walks on back roads and trails mostly, sometimes crossing highways. City walks were filled with fears about being jumped or followed or harassed. That's not special; that was life as an urban female. In a better part of the city we women wore sweatsuits and sneakers while on walks to indicate that we were exercising and not out on the streets to make money. I gladly moved to the country where walks were carefree and I could forget I was female.

But I had no idea until now what I looked like to others. I tried to think of the last female solo hiker I met on a trail. There are almost none. That's because women are afraid. They're told they should be. There are those horror stories broadcast on TV into our minds. Once when I was fishing in a remote area three hunters emerged from the woods with their firearms and I thought, they're probably harmless--but what if they're not? So now, so as not to be defenseless, I'm armed; now very consistently armed. I'm aware that this isn't a perfect solution. You might tell me to get a man or a pit bull or at least another woman companion. Why? I have the right to walk and hike free of fear. I sure do.

Looks Like My Old Roommate Eileen

This Three-Toed Box Turtle I met today reminded me of my former roommate Eileen, who woke every morning at 4:30, went right to the kitchen and ground her coffee beans in an electric grinder, shocking me awake five days a week. It sounded like Guadalcanal.

With blue-ringed eyes and great tact I asked Eileen to grind her coffee beans the night before and explained why. She said, "The coffee wouldn't be fresh then," and continued her daily grinding. Lurch (our other roommate) and I had a problem. We lost two hours' sleep because the hag had to have freshly-ground coffee beans or else she was gonna die, I guess. Lurch wasn't going to do anything, so it was up to me.

While Eileen was out one day, I got a screwdriver, crept into the kitchen, and unplugged the coffee grinder. I removed its base plate, stuck the screwdriver inside the mechanism, jammed it in there real good, and scraped its insides around and bent whatever I could. Then I replaced the base plate, wiped off my fingerprints and left it as I found it. Later that day while I was at work it occurred to me that whatever I had done might cause Eileen to be electrocuted. I shrugged. I'd find out in the morning.