If I’m lucky, my last residence will be in our own home in our present village. (The only place even luckier would be would be in a house backing onto a busy airport with dozens of restored classic and vintage aircraft flying around. I’d operate a B n’ B for visiting pilots.)
Living in the city is an experience in anonymity: there is no exchange of words throughout the elevator descent from your 44th floor apartment, across the building’s mezzanine to the escalator that whisks you down to the subway’s crowded train platform, to cram yourself into the standing-room only car.
Walking along a village street is a whole other world: it’s heavily punctuated with “Hi!” “G’day!” “How’s it goin’?” “Didn’t see you at the get-together last week.” and “Glad to hear you finally found your cat.” Progress is interrupted every few yards to pet the next dog and greet its owner.
Scattered around a city plaza’s parking lot, or even along its side-streets, abandoned shopping carts are a familiar sight. In contrast, a village’s grocery store carts are as sure to return as the swallows to Capistrano.
Some city youngsters are as supervised and disciplined as feral cats. The parents of any miscreant village kid are soon informed about Johnny’s misbehavior. The latest village gossip gets around faster than a speeding bullet.
If you are under witness protection, or an undercover foreign agent, living in a city provides better camouflage than a chameleon has, or a penguin in the middle of a colony of a thousand other penguins.
To everything there is a season: a time for the city, a time to go rural, and a time for the compromises of a village. For each there is a reason.
