I’m sitting on our deck, drinking a fine glass of cheap red wine and writing another post while my neighbor’s cat harasses me for attention. The weather has lingered around seventy degrees today, making me sort of nostalgic for fall, which isn’t helped by a bonfire in a different neighbor’s backyard. I’m in the city of Cleveland and I smell bonfires. I love this place.
I keep waiting for the school year to start, with all the college kids coming back. Now that I’ve been out for a while I feel old when I see the “Class of 2002″ shirts and realize that they’re referring to their _high school_ graduation. I feel even older when it dawns on me that these usually aren’t freshmen.
It’s like going to a club, requesting some good old fashioned Hate Dept., and being told that they _may_ have that on an eighties compilation CD. It seems that I’ve traded my spikes and leathers in for stained t-shirts and a baby sling, my (slightly pretentious) Hesse and Camus novels for Rodale editions and Dr. Sears.
I used to laugh when I thought of me as a wife and mother. I thought I’d be a hipster mom with a black-clad baby listening to Dead Can Dance while I drove to the art museum to give my child a little culture. The description is still somewhat accurate, I can still throw a mean halloween party, but I think I’ve loosened up on my rigorous subculture subscription.
Now I laugh when my husband calls me a hippy, knowing that there’s more truth to that than I’ll ever admit in public. I garden and extol the virtues of organic foods and buying local (when you can afford it), and dream of one day owning enough land for a small farm. I live in the city, as I always thought I would, but dream of the country.
Gone are the days of parties at houses with their own names, the days of staying up ’till three in the morning talking about nothing on ratty hallway couches stinking of cigarrette smoke and spoiled beer. Curb shopping for furniture is no longer _de rigeur,_ especially not with a toddler. Salvation Army shopping for that perfect t-shirt isn’t out of the question, but my wardrobe is no longer RIT dyed off the dollar rack.
Sometimes I miss that life, but then I think about what I have and how hard I’ve worked to get it. I may never get back to that place, but that’s probably why it’s so damned appealing now. Those soul-bearing days of three-job summers and beans and rice winters have been replaced by sun-ripe tomatoes, sloppy one-year-old kisses and the excitement of watching my home grow. I don’t think I’d trade back for all the world.