Brigitte Bowers: Faster-paced city life tempting, but it’s far from what matters

Recently, all of our neighbors seem to be moving away. Though this could easily be related to something we’ve done – owning barking dogs, noisy goats, and rowdy children – this does not seem to be the case. They seem to be moving simply because they’re getting older and they’re tired of taking care of their homes and lots. They claim they are not bothered by our dogs and teenage sons.

“Do they bark?” they ask kindly when I apologize for our lunatic dogs. “I never hear them.”

Perhaps this is true. Perhaps we are the only people in our neighborhood who are kept awake at night by our dogs. I hope so. It is what we deserve, after all, for spoiling them.

“Party? We didn’t hear anything,” they say when I ask forgiveness for the free-for-all that went on and on into the early morning, kids screaming as they threw each other into the pool in mid-December.

In any case, our neighbors won’t own up to irritation with my noisy family, and I believe them. After all, they would not resort to such drastic measures as selling their homes without first sending police officers to deliver their complaints.

Lately, I have been contemplating moving away from our neighborhood on the outskirts of Atwater, too. My husband and I have been in our home for 22 years, and I am ready for a change. I like to imagine living in the city of Merced, where I work and where we do much of our shopping. I could stroll along Bear Creek on a tranquil fall evening. Perhaps I would ride my bike to work on weekdays and amble over to the Main Street Starbucks on weekends.

“Let’s go to the movies and then get a beer at the pub,” I could say brightly to my husband on a Friday night, and instead of driving for 15 minutes, we could be there in five. Though this does not seem like much of a difference, a round trip to Merced ends up being a half-hour of driving, which is considerable.

I think I might even enjoy the evening traffic and the blasting of train horns less than a mile from my home at midnight. It all seems so cosmopolitan to someone who has lived on the outskirts of a town about one-third the size of Merced for many years.

And so, even though my husband does not want to move to Merced, or even within the city limits of Atwater, I have been dragging him to open houses in an attempt to get him accustomed to the possibility of living in town.

I suspect the real reason my husband shows little interest in moving has more to do with not wanting to clean out his shop than it does with any particular fondness for our home and neighborhood. His nefarious plan is to die with a cluttered shop, sawdust a foot thick on the floor, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up after he is gone.

Despite my visions of living the big-city life in Merced, I am myself torn about the prospect of moving. We have so many memories in our house, and I cannot look at any space on our property that does not hold some significance for me. My father, dead now for 10 years, designed the sprinkler system in our back yard. He advised us to plant the row of Italian cypress seedlings on the west edge of our property, trees that are now more than 50 feet high. At the back of our lot is an old ramshackle fort the kids build when they were still young enough to enjoy such things. The drake elm that shades our yard was a wedding gift from a family friend who is now deceased.

The shop my husband will not clean is a building he erected himself. We have photographs of my father-in-law, who died a year after we married, standing in the middle of our empty lot, before we put up our fences and planted the grass. The door frame to the hall bathroom has markings of my sons’ heights measured in pencil over the past eighteen years.

Growing up, it was my desire to live in one place for a long time. Before I married and settled into this home, I lived in more houses and apartments that I can count. And so this forever home is a dream realized, a place I belong to, a place my children can drive by and point out to their own children one day as the house where they grew up. But sometimes, our dreams trap us, too. It is not easy to leave a house that carries so much meaning, even when your desires tend toward different places.

In the end, we might decide to stay here for no other reason than our neighbors don’t seem to notice all the racket we make. In the closer quarters of town, our neighbors might start up a petition to have us – howling dogs, clamorous kids, and all – tarred and feathered and out on the street before the first month is over. Change will not look so attractive then.

This story was originally published December 19, 2014 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Faster-paced city life tempting, but it’s far from what matters."