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| Getting "buggy" in the country. |
Living in the country is different from the city for many reasons, but the biggest change for me are all the animals. Groundhogs, feral cats, and bugs...oh, my! I've had fun with a few Brooklyn boys over their squeamish ways when it comes to bugs. My big, loudmouth cousin from Sheepshead Bay had to call me to remove a silverfish before his shower, for instance. Or, my boyfriend from college who couldn't sleep to the sound of cicadas chirping at night in the basement bedroom of my mothers' New City house, preferring instead the buzz and hum of cars whizzing by on his native Bay Ridge streets to sleep to.
There's more: my Bronx-born mother chafing against the pretty little birds that woke her up on summer mornings, for singing from their nested perch on "her" window air conditioning unit. A well-to-do Park Slope couple from outside the country (of the United States) never really adjusted to communal apartment living, even after I sprung for a few area rugs and a sound machine to cover up the horror of my early morning dog runs. He was a big oaf of a man who loomed behind his tiny and plainly bug-eyed wife, a duo of dysfunctional who belong in some suburban Aussie condo, but not in the city that never sleeps.
Ditto with the wacky lady next door, who was so unnerved by my bedroom air conditioner unit's sporadic summer use (usually at nighttime and after work, too) in my 4th floor walk-up, she banged on it for weeks until she finally left me a weirdly fretful note of frustration. Instead of listening to my reasoning from across the narrow alleyway through our window exchange, she condescendingly offered to buy me some freestanding floor model that's all the rage from wherever the fuck she's from, because I detected an accent not of New York.
She'd rather "die from the heat" than live with the banal white noise of my bedroom AC, even though the top floor apartment reached in excess of 100°F, and I had to buy it for my snow dog (who would have actually died from the daytime heat), instead of accommodating a rather inane background noise; such was the insane wisdom of the deranged, frazzled-haired Euro lady next door. It was clearly my fault, all of it, everything in the universe, because I'm too poor for her tastes and she's mentally ill.
My mom has gone so far as to request a mausoleum, so that her neurotic remains will never come in contact with bugs. Same turn of the mind as my former building maintenance guy, who freaked out over oven mitts that had fallen between the cracks of his poorly fitted kitchen cabinetry, blaming me instead for these microbiotic horrors left in the wake of my economic eviction from the building; a prolonged process that was supposedly devoted to my non-payment, but was, in reality, yet another city scam about inherited rent stabilization and legally binding leases that are immoral as well as nonsensical, none of which benefited me at any of the times I write about.
And so I've developed to full effect my natural savoir faire about life, inherited through my maternal Norman Abruzzi lines; a shrug of the shoulders delivered much like my grandmother's laidback saying of "Que sera, sera." Whatever will be, will be. Just like this summer's bug migration that I accept as part of my good life here in the valley: first came the big black ants that I tried to deposit on scraps of paper outdoors, one by one, in Buddhist solidarity about the sanctity of all life, and then gave up on from the sheer volume of it.
Next came the spider who hunted them by setting up residence under the sink in a corner of the kitchen cabinet by the floor and near the old radiator that let them in, then the fruit flies, followed by very small (and tenacious) red ants clustered in the butter drawer of the fridge, feeding on the sweet remnants of fresh salted cream butter that remains there today (before I eat it with a sandwich for my lunch today). I accept it all, as part of this beautiful life. See you soon.
