City vs. Country, What's a Girl to Do?

I am a city girl, or at least I like to think so. I grew up in Sacramento. Born and Raised. Some might not think I should brag about that, but I am happy here. For a year I lived in Allentown, PA. I was 13-14, it was okay. I was in exile and that is a story for another time.

While growing up in Sacramento I would have the occasional visits to the family farm where my dad was born and raised. I told myself at the time that I would never, ever live in the COUNTRY. There were bugs and dirt, of the kind that I did not want to ever experience on a daily basis. And, they didn’t have REAL heat or air-conditioning… just a wood stove and the nasty swamp coolers. I put up with the country in those small doses, and then went back home to the city.

I lived at the family farm for few months when I was 18 and once awoke to what I thought were muscle spasms in my forearm and when I opened my eyes found a mouse pinned beneath my arm. I screamed, he squeaked, and when I lifted my arm he ran off. I don’t know who was more freaked out, the mouse or me…?


Well, life happens, and God throws a curve-ball! I ended up living in the country for a huge chunk of my life. I have lived other places too… I lived in Laguna Beach, Orange County, from years 19-22. It was ok, but it was not home, so I moved back home. Ended up in Yuba City, which is a city, but very rural.

But the majority of my life I lived in the country…from the time Charlie was about 1 until just very recently 2.5 years ago… so that would be about 16 years.

When we first moved from Yuba City, Charlie was just a little over 1 year. We moved into a single-wide trailer on the farm. This place had a swamp cooler that worked when it felt like it, no heat to speak of because the heating ducts were all torn out under the trailer. The septic backed up when it rained heavily. There were mice running around the place like crazy. We learned to share our living space with the mice. It was not too bad. I had a constant container of D-CON on the stove top, and I would sit in my chair in the living room area and watch the mice come up thru the gas burners and sit, munching on the D-CON. It was ok, because I knew that would be one of their last meals.

I really freaked out the time a POSSUM came thru the front of the under-sink cabinet into the kitchen. Just pushed the door open, and was gonna just make himself at home, until I screamed like a FREAK. I was really freaking out because I heard some banging of the cabinet door before I saw his head poke through. If you have ever seen a possum up-close or from afar even, they are nasty, fierce looking freaks of nature.




I lived at one time in a 23 ft camp trailer with no running water or toilet facilities for about 4 months at one time, hooked up to electric with an extension cord. At that place when we did have to use the toilet we went outside and into an abandoned single wide mobile home, and used the toilet there; that’s also where we used the shower. It was winter, rainy most of the time and really cold. We (all three of us) slept in the same bunk. Not very comfortable, but it was better than in our station wagon on the side of a road somewhere.

Then we rented an abandoned crack house, (seriously), and lived there for a while, trying to fix it up. That was in the country just outside of Sacramento, directly under the Sacramento International Airport flight path. We were a mile from the airport. That was interesting. From there we moved into a 2 bedroom house, with a fenced yard. We lived there for 8 years. It was great. The landlord was decent, the rent was cheap, it was a mile from the family farm. It still had ants and mice and flies. But it was really nice.

Then we bought a house which was a converted barn. Really, it use to be a barn. When we bought it (our first home) it was set up as a duplex, with two studios, one apartment down and one up. It was so small that there was not any realistic way to enclose the stairs, so we spent 3 years going outside and up the stairs to get to the bedrooms. Hey, you work with what you have right!?! The septic for that place really, really could not handle any amount of rain. So for two winters, which were horribly heavy rain years, we could not use the toilets. They would back up and it was nasty. We rented a porta-potty both those winters. You guessed it, we would have to go out in the rain in the middle of the night, go down the outside stairs in the rain, and around the side of the house to a dry spot where the potty was set up. One night the wind blew so hard the potty tipped over. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

My hubby and I split up soon about half way thru the 3 years we owned the house and I was quite happy with selling it and moving on. I moved on by moving back in with dad at the family farm. My life is like a concentric spiral. Do you see the pattern????

I lived with my dad for about 8 months before my car broke down and I moved back to town, finally. Is the circle complete? Will I spend the remaining years of my life in the city? Stay tuned. I am sure I will be answering that question in the years to come.

Oh… I started out writing this because I wanted to talk about something completely different than I ended up with here. Strange how that works out. I wanted to write about how this past Saturday, Charlie and I were standing in my bedroom and Charlie looked out the window and said “Mom, I just saw a big mouse out there.” Yep, there is a RAT living under the slab of concrete which is my patio, in the city. It looks a bit like this:




SIGH. Gotta love it.