I grew up in the country, about 10 or 12 miles out of town and while there were things I loved about it when I was a very young child–by the time I got to be a teenager, I despised living so far away from all the action. As an involved, socially motivated teen, I definitely felt cursed to be stuck in the country when all the fun stuff was going down in town. I swore I was going to raise my kids in the city where they wouldn’t feel so isolated.
Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I do live in the city. My kids love going to grandma and grandpa’s house in the country and have some idealistic fantasies about what life would be like growing up on the side of a mountain, but overall, they are content to be “city kids.”
One of my daughters has a friend who lives quite far out of the city and commutes into high school here in the city every day. My daughter loves spending summers out at her house camping outside, boating and swimming in the pond, and generally lounging and romping in the country. Her friend, however, spends a good deal of time at our house during the school year. She can come by after school and stay in town for extra curricular events, come over on days off from school and just use our centrally located home as her “home away from home” in the city. I told her mother a couple years ago, not to worry, that I understood what it was like to live so far out of town and she (the daughter) was welcome at our house any time.
Today, there was a knock at our door mid-afternoon–it was my daughter’s friend and her mother with a basket of food and a very sweet card. The card thanked us for providing a “second home” in town which enabled everyone to do more things, stay involved and cope with such a long commute. But I wanted them to understand that it really goes both ways–my daughter gets a dose of living in the country when she spends long weekends at their house in the woods. So, we’ve really got the best of both worlds for our kids–instead of being one or the other, they can experience what it’s like to be both city kids and country kids!