The city quitter is a thing
“Do you live in a v-i-l-l-a-g-e?” When saying the part ‘do you live in a’, the voice sounds unnaturally low but somewhat questioning, after which ‘village’ should be pronounced with a firm swing and strangely high. This is roughly how the average city dweller asks me for directions. Because this question always comes only after I’ve told where I live, so then you also know that it’s no longer meant as a question but more a verdict that is pronounced over you.
After ten years in the city, I wanted to read a book in my bikini in the garden and barbecue without my upstairs neighbor being in the smoke. In one half of my former homes, this was not possible because it didn’t even have a balcony, so I lay a bit half in the window sill (and barbecuing was therefore not such a good plan), in the other half, the whole block was looking out the window because the neighbor was lying in a bikini on the balcony and the summer body plan apparently was not yet fully in effect. By the way, you may feel free to replace ‘houses’ with ‘shack’ or ‘rooms’, because that’s really all it was. A house with a garden and behind it a nature reserve just three sighs and a little fart from the city seemed to me to come close to a kind of paradise. The city dwellers understood me well because wow, a garden, but they also didn’t understand me again, because where do you get coffee then? I’ve actually never reached the point where I explain that you can also make it yourself and that coffee can also be drunk differently than from cardboard and on the go.
But suddenly the roles have reversed. The city dweller sighs when I post a video of three deer hopping through the forest behind my house at seven in the morning. I receive messages with only the words ’a garden‘ followed by heart-eyes-smileys, which seems positive to me. And I’m also quite content that I can have breakfast outside in the sun, play football with my dog in the backyard, and (it will never get more bourgeois) I dried my very first laundry in the garden this weekend.
I suddenly hear the city dweller asking where she could walk to on the weekend because it’s always so busy on the street and all the benches in the park are occupied. The supermarket in the center, where she lives on the corner, is not passable for a second because no one keeps a normal distance. And actually, she doesn’t dare very well, which I also understand. I still try to suggest that she can bike into the polder, but from her reaction, I can tell she doesn’t quite know where that starts. I hear people grumbling about the suggestion of how to make your balcony cozier because: they don’t have a balcony at all. And it makes me think.
The city quitter turned out to be on the rise, these are people who leave the city around the age of twenty, but I foresee an even greater increase in city quitters after our intelligent lockdown. Yes, it’s a bummer that the RIJKS doesn’t deliver breakfast to you (hey, are you reading along?) but a self-made scrambled egg at the table in the garden is not exactly poverty.
Could it now officially be so? Do the people in the city finally understand why I live outside the ring? I would almost consider a dance in a bikini with my porcelain coffee cup for it. The city quitter seemed to be on the rise, but I suspect that he is now marching straight into the countryside.
