Rural Life
I grew up in the country. Sort of. Our farmhouse was just over the county line from Princeton, part of Lawrenceville, a sort of red-headed stepchild of both towns. When we moved in, I was, I think, four? I was born across the street from Princeton University where my father was an English professor, then we went to live in London for a year where I acquired a posh accent from attending my posh nursery school while my sisters, doomed to the comprehensive, spoke like ‘guttersnipes’ according to some upper-class lady who encountered them in Harrods. I took ballet classes, and my parents called me the ‘dirty ole fairy’. We took an ocean liner home, I forget which one, my parents partied with the cast of La Dolce Vita returning from filming the movie in Italy and I lost my stuffed Siamese cat onboard which was heartbreaking for a child who had been exposed to so much culture without appreciating any of it.
photo by Joshua Gaunt
We moved to Lawrenceville after that to this farmhouse that was in massive disrepair, the ceilings falling, sinks pulling away from the wall, uncut grass but the bones of what my architect mother would eventually transform into something wonderful. Meanwhile, a rat jumped out of the refrigerator produce bin, a woodchuck chased my father, we stepped on any number of rusty nails, and the two horses that were stabled in the apple orchard kept getting out and galloping to Hopewell, my dad in hot pursuit. It was magical and awful. As I grew older and needed to have friends it became clear that we were living in isolation, except for our next-door neighbors who had boys and a mean woman with a feral child who lived behind us in an illegal house without access to the road.
My friend, my only friend was our handyman, Abe. I told him stuff about what I was reading and also about school. One day he climbed a tree and shot himself in the head. My mother said his wife was mean. When I claimed we were friends she looked appalled and told me he was an alcoholic which explained why he never let me drink from his thermos.
Because my mother worked and no one was home when I got off the school bus but our cleaning lady, I took to hanging out with her, reading morbid poetry and obituaries from the local paper. I read her my stories and poetry and it felt like we were friends even though my parents paid her. I was awash in loneliness, in the belief that no one would ever love me or want to trust me with their idea and secrets. I read books about girls left alone through fate, orphans, abandoned, lost. I wandered around naming the trees on the property and having conversations with small woodland creatures like chipmunks.
I left at eighteen. Four years of college, living always in urban areas, Dublin, New York, Hoboken, London, San Francisco, Dallas, and finally Chicago. I loved going to the wilderness, hiking up mountains, staying in cabins but I always returned to a city, a place you can look out the window and witness people doing things, walking their dogs, carrying groceries, playing with their kids, kissing, fighting, living. You didn’t have to go outside to connect in person, you were surrounded by life. The subway, the L, the Metro, commuting with other people you saw every day, strangers but also friends.
Now, we are moving to a small town in northern Michigan where it is so quiet a woodpecker sounds like a jackhammer and you can go an entire day, several days, without seeing anyone. We bought our house several years ago and I have spent winter months there without my husband, happily alone. But that was temporary, and this is not. I can’t help remembering how it felt to spend so many hours waiting for something to happen. Like Frankie in The Member of the Wedding I sometimes still feel like that child who had no friends. “She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.”
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach