City Mouse

The sun is warm and expansive today after a week of dishrag rain, and swallows are flirting in the treetop just outside the window. My bedroom looks down over an enormous park where cylists are riding in ellipses, the local soccer team is running drills, and circus tents swoop turquoise and white like some exotic taffy. Dan’s office is just on the other side of a second park; I can see the bar where he goes for mid-day espressos in tiny glass cups. On the opposite hilltop, our city’s ancient epicenter sprawls like a cat, the afternoon reflecting off its walls in shades of terra cotta and wheat. The view is breathtaking.

And the wonderful impossibility of this September is that I am finally starting to feel connected to this place. It’s due to a combination of factors, not the least of which is our new house. We moved from an impersonal apartment building in the suburbs to a three-family home in a vibrant little neighborhood, and the inclusive nature of community is working its magic on me. I love chatting with our downstairs neighbors as they cook supper, bumping into friends while walking Natalie to school, getting to know the Napoletan boyfriend and girlfriend who own the pizzeria down the street, buying vegetables and fresh flowers at the open market every Wednesday morning.

Not that community doesn’t come with its annoying moments. For instance, the woman at the pharmacy who schedules our medical appointments is insatiably curious about the nature of our ailments and the unfamiliar details on our personal documents, and discusses them loudly enough that the deaf great-grandfather in the foot care section can follow along. And then there is our next-door neighbor, a friend’s “crazy great aunt” (his words) who likes to ambush the girls and I just as we step inside our front gate and talk for fifteen increasingly uncomfortable minutes about her childraising theories. Both ladies have good intentions, I know, but… well, encounters with them stretch the limits of my politeness. (Probably a good thing to have stretched, in the long run.)

Crazy great aunts aside, I really do love feeling like a legitimate part of society. Beyond finding my neighborhood niche, I’m also doing my best to expand along with our home front. I finally started teaching English to some friends (once the initial paralyzing nervousness wears off, I really do love it), and we’ve been having company over so often that my head is spinning. My heart is full though. We’ve spent a very long year and a half with closed doors, and it’s liberating to open them wide, to invite people to be part of our lives again.

Of course, the country mouse in me wants to scamper back to my cricket noises and single-person hovel. Socializing comes about as naturally to me as tanning and geography; as long as I had access to a library and broadband, I would happily live out the rest of my days as a hermit. But something deep inside me knows it would wither without relationships, so I’m finding the courage to be social—a bit more every day—and as reward? The first delicious taste of belonging.