To flee or not to flee (a.k.a. hormone-induced melancholia)

Every now and then, a holding pattern becomes a rut, and you stop churning for long enough to realize that a lot of the things that drew you to something are just not there anymore. Maybe it's a workplace, or a relationship, or a hobby that's lost its shine. You realize you've changed, thus you've grown apart from whatever it may be, and you begin to wonder whether keeping that thing is worth it anymore.

My husband and I are in that sort of holding pattern rut. It's been almost a year now since our lives got tossed on their small, smarting ears, and we've been treading water and trying different strokes and occasionally resorting to the dead man's float, and we find ourselves talking about chucking it all and just leaving. Going to the country. Hanging up the citified, suburban lifestyle for the other. It's not as if we ever entirely bought into that picture. We don't have a mini-van, we live in a house that's under 1000 square feet, we don't have tickets to the theater or the the professional sports teams venues.

When I ran to the spice store recently to get pepper (yes, pepper,) I realized it was the first time I'd been to the Strip District in months. The very place I swore I'd visit frequently. I live 10 minutes from it, and I never go there. How often does one need good curry? And even my beloved PennMac—I bought some dried tortellini at ALDI a few days ago, and I felt just a twinge of guilt. I know, it's cheaper at PennMac, but this bag was right there and I was in a hurry and God knows when I'll get down to Penn Avenue again...

It's not just food. When did I last attend a concert? The symphony on my last big, awful birthday was lovely, but it was the first time in a long time, and I'd likely have nixed the spending of that major coin if it hadn't been a happy surprise that was sprung upon me. Even free concerts go unattended by us because, honestly, I have a kid now and I don't have free babysitters living next door. All those fun city activities, art festivals, outdoor movies, rails-to-trails hikes—all of them go largely unexplored by me, by my family. And if having a kid didn't kill the ability to do this stuff easily and without planning, throw in a job and you'll understand my situation. We're living by the city, close to the city, enjoying the nearness of the city...but not really benefiting from the city. Our church remains my only regularly visited bastion of "city." It's a slice of real, varied life in every way, and that I do enjoy. Most of the time. But it stands pretty much alone in the ongoing-city-exposure category.

Seriously, if ever we were to drop the ball and sell it all, this is the time. There's no great, full-time job with incredible benefits for either of us to walk away from. We're not taking advantage of urban proximity anyway. Why not vacate? Our house is so small, affordable, and convenient to town, in a pretty good school district, that I suspect it would go without much trouble. I really do. We've made it more cute and more modern, and maybe I'm fooling myself, but I truly believe we'd sell pretty easily in the right season.

Yet. There are two of us to consider, and even if we're both on board with the departure, we're prone to wonder: do we have what it takes? Leaving it all behind means more work, a different kind of work. We don't enjoy hard work now; what will change? I love manageable amounts of weeding and cleaning and the like, but a little goes a long way. My husband? The same. I don't feel confident we'd succeed at any of our country notions. The alpaca farm? Mucking out stables, cleaning hooves, feeding and watering twice daily in cold months. The lettuce and herbs farm? Ceaseless garden chores, paperwork in order to sell legally, inspections in order to be classified as organic. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is simple anymore.

And, just as getting married complicated major decisions, made them suddenly complex and sticky, having a child has made decisions exponentially more difficult. What is best for my little boy? If I move to a tiny town, buy a dilapidated farm (the only kind we'd be able to swing), and raise free-range chickens who lay free-range eggs, then must I home-school? Cyber school? Will my only child despise the isolation? Will he become a loner, an awkward kid who can't face a roomful of strangers without shortness of breath? Or would it be the best gift we could give him?

Is it more important that we keep the proximity to population so that someday, when we hopefully have a more predictable and more comfortable lifestyle, we'll be able to soak up all that our fair city has to offer? Or will we likely spend our days endlessly running from pointless practice to pointless practice, wondering why we never see the neighbors or family, trying desperately to make sense and meaning out of the whirlwind of stupid busy-ness? Is it worth it to offer my little boy diversity that he rarely tastes? Is it worth the taxes, the traffic, the pollution? Will we look back someday and wonder why we stuck around and spent our lives with all these folks breathing down our necks? Or will my sweet kid change the world because he saw much, and learned much, and understood much about the world through the eyes of a place that he couldn't conquer and master with ease?

I honestly don't know what's best. I know in my heart that this is the time to cut and run. And I also know that, as sung so wisely by Neil Young, there comes a time when a person must decide whether he's "old enough to repaint" or "young enough to sell." I'm not sure which one fits me, or us, best. But I feel increasingly certain that, pretty soon, the decision will be made for us.

Weird, wild suburban visitor

It was late morning, and the boy and I were out front. I was pulling weeds (my least favorite yet most common outdoor activity), and the kiddo was drawing race tracks and driveways on the sidewalk with his chunky chalk. It was quiet, which is rather unusual since my son is a bit of a chatty guy, and we were both focused on our work in the chilly sunshine.

I saw something from the corner of my eye, and glanced up at Marcus—only to catch my breath. Directly behind my little boy, not more than four feet away, a behemoth wild tom turkey was strolling along. Marcus, who was completely oblivious, looked up and saw me staring with intent interest at him; before he could ask me why, I instructed him quietly, “Turn around and look behind you, slowly.” He did as he was told, without a word, and the giant bird was so close to him that a single step forward would have allowed him to reach out and touch its shimmery-dull brown feathers.

His head swiveled back around, still slowly (good listening!), and the expression on his sweet face was absolutely priceless. He didn’t burst into tears, or holler, or say a word, but his eyes were huge and I could tell he was pretty uncomfortable with the proximity of that ridiculous creature as it strutted past, waddle bobbing with each step. “It’s a wild turkey, honey—isn’t it big?” I said softly. He nodded, and turned to look at it once again.

The tom had continued on his way, and was stepping out onto the road to cross it. He never looked at us, never wavered from his path in any way, simply trod across the street and up into the neighbor’s back yard, out of sight. It was rather surreal. I thought about creeping over to the neighbor’s to try taking a photograph, but even if I were successful (highly unlikely, considering my history), it seemed anticlimactic somehow; I’d missed capturing the best picture of all, that being the enormous creature right behind—and standing nearly as tall as—my astonished son.

And just a few hours later that same day? Our first hummingbird of the year showed up at the feeder. I pointed him out to Marcus, and we watched the tiny miracle zipping away toward the tallest tree. I said to him, “Can you believe that little hummer and that huge turkey are both birds? How can that be?”

His answer was simple, yet profound in its honesty: “I do not know.”

Neither do I, my boy. Neither do I. But I do know that the more I see, the more certain I am that none of it is accidental. What an amazing Creator is obvious in everything around us.

Go out and be awed today. (You can be odd, too, if you’d like. I highly recommend both.)

"How can you eat that?!"

Meet Peter the buck. I call him Peter partly as a nod to REM band member Peter Buck, and partly because I photographed him in between bites of our abandoned pumpkin. Get it? Pumpkin eater?

But his name is not important. The important thing is that he is limping a bit these days, and one of his antlers appears to be shorter than the other. It wasn’t shorter a couple of weeks ago when we first spotted him, and we’re pretty certain it’s the same deer. I guess we can’t be absolutely sure… It’s not important. He’s limping a tiny bit, his antler has been broken off. Has he been hit by a car? That’s a very likely possibility, since the pumpkin photograph location is less than 20 feet from a sharp bend on a busy road—and that, of course, is the favored crossing spot of all the deer that hang out in our yard.

Sometimes we have 5 or 6 deer at once. Mostly doe—the two buck we’ve seen rarely hang with the babes, at least not when we’re looking. But they’re all regulars at our “club.” Why? They probably ran out of space, quite frankly. Plus, they know there’s easy pickin’s in our neighborhood (my animal-loving neighbor feeds them, so even when gardens aren’t blooming they have reason to pass through).

The point is, we humans are crowding them out with all our pretty little suburban neighborhoods. We’re driving big, heavy, metal killing machines across all their favorite pathways. And a lot of them are getting hit, maimed, or killed. I won’t lie: I feel really bad about that, about all the shrinking habitats of all the beautiful wildlife around us. The last time I saw an injured doe lying in the street, I was literally sick to my stomach as I called the game warden; it’s a horrible sight, the flailing limbs, the fruitless attempts to lift the head…just sickening.

But as bad as I feel, it will not keep me from eating venison. That’s right, deer flesh. I eat it. I’ve eaten it since I was a kid.

Before you slap a “barbarian” label on my forehead, let me explain myself a bit. If you’re a vegetarian and you’re reading this, I honestly have no qualms with your non-meat choices. I am pretty certain that the original, Garden-of-Eden diet did not include animal flesh. It wasn’t needed. That came around after we got kicked out of there. With some research and attention, a person can live a meatless life and be much healthier than most of us jowly, restaurant-abusing Americans. I was getting pretty good at going meatless until I got married (man want meat); plus, the whole diabetic issue isn’t helping—I’ve found very few foods that have the same hold-me-over power as meat—but I’m sure if I had limitless funds and my own dietitian, I could be meatless. I’d miss meat, especially as a cook, but it could be done. And that would be my individual choice, as it should be.

However, for the meat-eaters out there who dare to ask me the question that titles this post, I say, My dear carniverous hypocrite, have you ever ordered veal or lamb in a fancy restaurant, never giving a second thought to the fuzzy, adorable creature that your meal was in life? Have you ever stuffed a big, fat burger into your face or carved a ham at Christmas or Easter? Enjoyed a steak or a turkey dinner? Because if you have, then you cannot make comments about the barbarism of eating deer meat. I have never walked through a butcher’s workspace, nor seen a cow or pig taken in for slaughter, but how could it be any less awful than watching a deer be gutted prior to transport? Death is death; killing is killing.

And think about this: there’s my little Peter in the back yard, munching on rotten pumpkin and dying grass and relishing the memory of our pole beans from a few months back. If some lucky hunter takes him during season (which is unlikely since he’s in such a protected area), that hunter will get a more-than-half-rack to brag about and a freezer full of whatever meat forms he chooses, and it’ll be lean, healthy meat—no hormones, no chance of mad deer disease, no genetic alterations other than what God himself ordained. Sounds pretty safe, eh? Compare it to your faceless, nameless slab o’ beef (you have to assume they’re telling you the truth about the source animal, right?) that may or may not have been vacuum packed in carbon monoxide in order to keep its fresh color longer than it should…

I ponder at this time every year why some people feel righteously justified in turning their noses up at me. I think it’s founded in our complete separation of man from his food sources. It’s easy to badmouth game-eaters if you’ve never been hungry for a day in your life; honestly, how do any of us truly know what we're capable of eating? Have you ever really suffered from lack of food? I haven't. And how simple to slip into superiority about not eating wild animals when you never have to be confronted with the “civilized” (cough, cough) killing of animals raised purely for meat sales. Honestly, I think most folks would want to throw up after visiting a big, smelly egg farm, right? But those nice, white, clean eggs in their spotless cases are so removed from a chicken’s bottom that no one thinks much about it.

Well, we need to think about it. We need to grow more food in soil that we turn and weed. We need to learn more about what goes into all the ready-to-eat stuff that we consume daily without question. We need to be more responsible eaters in general. And we, as a society, need to stop vilifying the people who consume hunted game—especially when you consider that the naysayers are just as likely to be the very folks who are directly or indirectly responsible for Peter the buck’s shrinking habitat injuries. There’s a very good chance that because he’s injured and there’s limited land for him and his cronies, he won’t make it through the winter.

Now, who’s the barbarian again?

Good flick

I don’t normally tout or slam films—they’re fine, but I’m not a big movie person and it takes something special to get my attention. Finding Nemo did, if you recall, and there are a few big-people movies that stand out in a crowd, but by and large I feel concern for our society and the amount of attention and time we give to something unreal. And movies are, for the most part, unreal. They’re a means of escaping the real. (Television is the true enemy—but that’s a post for another day.)

Then, there are movies that don’t fit the mold. Some biographies, historically accurate movies, movies that do not come to exist for the same reasons that pop culture creates films. One such example is The Unforeseen.

I’ve been waiting to rent The Unforeseen for about 2 years—at least it feels as if that’s how long it’s been on my “wait” list in Netflix.* I saw it previewed on PBS way back when, and my curiosity was piqued. It was presented as a pretty fair-minded, multi-sided documentary about suburban sprawl.

And it succeeds, in my opinion anyway. It’s very good. It made me think about the issue from different angles; it forced me to consider all the factors that go into building most modern-day housing developments. It provided the basics in understanding how these projects are funded, and who benefits the most, and which beneficiaries take on the greatest risks. It gave a face, a voice, to all the different players in that drama. It will break your heart a little, and make you angry a little. It’s poetic like a Cormac McCarthy book, and it tells a story that almost anyone living in America today has been affected by.

Would it cause you to change your mind about buying a home in a “sprawl” development? If your mind is made up and you love the house, then I doubt it. But if you’re just considering it, or if there’s another of these housing plans in the works near you, I can see where it might light a fire under your bum.

So, when you get a chance, I’d recommend you see it. But ladies, be prepared: Robert Redford (who helped produce it) makes an appearance, and you may be shocked to see how time has worn him down. There remains very little evidence of the Sundance Kid.

* Didn’t want you to think that I was contradicting myself—we have the bare-bones Netflix package, which permits 2 movies per month, not at the same time…and we sometimes remember to watch that many.