De Ce Monde Secret de l’ Amelie Americaine

When did this happen to me? When did the dream change? When did a nineteenth century farm house, twenty-two miles north of Manhattan become my new dream?

I should have recognized the signs of dangerous domestication when I stood in Gracious Home on the Upper West Side yesterday and listened with rapture about joys of owning a dyson vacuum cleaner. I have to say those Europeans make quality home appliances. I recently purchased an eighty dollar iron made by Rowenta, and my clothes have never looked so pressed and polished.

This is my problem. My idea of what quality of life is to me, has changed. Alarm bells have been rung throughout my social circle. So far, I’ve had two close friends give me prolonged pep talks about why I must be feeling this weird urge to abandon the city. One subtlety threatened to never visit me in the suburbs, saying I’ll be all alone up there in a big house. The other said that although she would visit me, that she felt like one of the main themes I write about in my blog is feeling isolated, and that this would only be exasperated by moving out to a smaller town where I can’t get Chinese at 2 in the morning.

The problem is with this logic, is that I already do not go out of my apartment after nine p.m. I already feel isolated yet cramped living among 8 million people. Yes I do count on feeling some small inconveniences, like not being able to just walk to the corner deli to buy cat food, but for all the conveniences of my life, living next to ‘restaurant row’ and several bobo boutiques, I don’t really take advantage of them, anymore. I’ve done it. I’ve lived my twenties and early thirties as a free single woman, still don’t feel like it is the end all, be all, that it is suppose to be. I don’t know what the answer is, but this life, as I am living it, is not it.

I have been walking the same route for six years….still feeling, yes, alone and isolated. This morning I walked my dog to the specialty food store where I buy his food, and I listened to the woman ahead of me in line describe how happy she was about never having kids because her brother’s children have all been losers. “Well maybe if you have a kid you can break the cycle,” the kind store owner counseled her. “No, I have had several wonderful dogs.” She looked down on her puffy white poodle.

“I can’t possibly become this woman,” I thought to myself. So isolated in fact, from life…never allowing the upsets, and the deep family scars from loving someone other than a ten pound fur ball. Sometimes I think that the only reason my cat gives me attention is that I feed her. Is that love? I don’t think so.

The truth is that there was a time when the thoughts of having a family was too chaotic, and scary a prospect. I avoided it, out of fear that I would fall into some inevitable downward family cycle. I embraced my singledom, like my life depended on it. But I looked at this woman, probably in her early sixties, and saw everything that I now fear I will become, if I don’t shake this life up.

Many of us who live in the city are refugees; from our families, our former countries, our bad marriages, and limited prospects. The idea of commitment and closeness on this level had to be repugnant, so that we were able to release ourselves enough to take a chance in the Big Apple. We happily traded in our sadness and burdens for the excitement and possibilities of the city. Where anything could happen, and opportunity to reinvent ourselves became possible.

But a miracle has occurred in my life. Almost eight years since I stepped on that plane at JFK airport, I’ve settled into myself. Knock on wood, the day to day life seems to be holding it’s course. I’ve been…stable…I’ve become a proud grown up.

Maybe they are right, and I have watched Under the Tuscan Sun one too many times. I do have a romantic notion that decorating and fixing up an old home is like fixing up myself. Maybe I will be isolated. Or maybe like Diane Lane says,”The house protects the dreamer… and great things happen, even late in the game.”

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