The 1920 census of the United States, or so I read, was the first in which a greater number of its citizens resided in urban rather than rural areas. Therefore, like most Americans who were born mid-century, I have a foot planted firmly in both worlds. I myself have always lived in a city whereas my parents grew to maturity in the country. That makes all of us demographic clichés.   

      Visits to my grandparents required a fifty-five-mile journey which took us back almost as many years in time. Many children, now as then, relieve the tedium of automobile trips by mauling each other. I preferred to stare through the window almost without blinking, lest I miss something. I knew every rock and rill, every bend in the road, like my own face in a mirror. While still in the early grades, years before I was old enough for a driver’s license, I could have walked every inch of the way from my house to theirs.  

      These visits were thoroughly rustic affairs complete with lowing cattle, redolent country stores and uncooperative plumbing. I have watched in fascinated horror as decapitated poultry expired in flopping, gyrating death throes. I have taken baths in little, round galvanized tubs into which water warmed on the stove had first been poured. On freezing nights my feet have been shielded from frostbite by a brick heated at the hearth and then wrapped in newspaper. When a hapless kitten got into the well house and tumbled to a watery death, Grady, the hired man, was obliged to retrieve the body to prevent contamination of our drinking water. (Concerned that he would suffer the same fate, I apprehensively watched him inch his way lower and lower into the frigid hole in the earth, legs braced as far apart as they would go against the round dirt sides. )

      And there was the day I was playing in the corn crib and suddenly sensed I was not alone. Lying atop a ledge at eye level was a glistening black snake patiently waiting for the rats and mice that came in to feed off the grain. Instantly, I decided to play somewhere else. Permanently.  

      I remember the smell of Granddaddy’s tool shed, an aroma like no other that came from the oils used to maintain steel and leather and one I could identify even now, forty years later, without a moment’s hesitation. I have bobbed for apples at country Halloween fairs, harvested bucketsful of wild blackberries to be baked by my grandmother into incomparable pies, picked nut meats from the rock-hard black walnuts that fell from the tree in the front yard, and, once, made tracks just ahead of an escaped bull. The only thing I refused to do was gather eggs. For some reason, I was afraid of chickens. 

      All the above is, needless to say, pretty unremarkable stuff. Anyone whose personal history includes even casual brushes with provincial life could top it with one haystack tied behind them. Ordinary though it may have been, however, it was a) early and b) vivid, an unbeatable combination.  

      For the last several decades, these pastoral longings, weakly clinging to life, have been suffocating beneath a hillock of urban responsibilities, and I suppose I had long since given them up for dead. But as inscrutable fate would have it, my daily, blear-eyed commute takes me directly past an attractive, curving building that until recently I mostly ignored. For that offense, I have humbly begged its forgiveness and now blow it a big, wet and thoroughly sincere kiss each time I behold its red-brick glory. The reason for this newly found admiration and growing affection is proclaimed by the large, silver letters on its street side: South Carolina Retirement Systems. 

      Because I work in a library, my family is accustomed to the reading matter I bring home by the sack full. So I figured they would blow off the sudden appearance of titles like Field and Furrow, The Family Cow, Rural Water Systems, Log Houses You Can Build, and the total output of Louise Dickinson Rich, Gladys Taber and Dori Saunders. So I figured wrong. 

      My husband Peter was the first to voice the unspoken thoughts hanging in the air like tear gas. 

“Honey”, he said, sinking onto a sofa and patting the space beside him, “we need to talk”. 

      “What about?” 

      “About…That Thing. You know, uh, That Change soon to happen in your life. ”

      “This is the twenty-first century, Darling. No one refers to menopause as ‘the Change’ anymore. You may say the word without fear of social ostracism. ”

      He sighed audibly. “Retirement. I’m talking about retirement. It had addled more brains that crack, and you’re next on the list. Resist. Resist with all your might. ”  

      My toes pivoted inward and my voice rose an octave. “Whatever do you mean?” 

      “Oh, don’t give me that look. You know perfectly good and well what I mean. You want us to sell out hook, line and barrel and move to your grandparents homestead in Dunavant. ”  He left the room and returned with a copy of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House in one hand and The Egg and I in the other. “There!” he said, holding them up like Exhibit A. “In case you haven’t finished these yet, Blandings filed for chapter thirteen and Betty MacDonald for divorce. And may you profit by their examples. ”

      “Oh, I don’t want to live on a real farm”, I said. 

      “There’s another kind?”

      I put my arms around him and kissed his temple. “I just want to live in the country, with a city close by. I could keep a garden and a few laying hens and learn how to can and preserve, and you could wear jeans and plaid shirts and drive around in a pickup. Sort of a pretend farm. ”

      Again he sighed. “There may have been a time when you knew one end of a shovel from the other, but nowadays your level of agricultural expertise is the petting zoo at the State Fair. Couldn’t you just be happy with that?”

      “That’s once a year. What about the other fifty-one weeks?”

      “I hear The Dukes of Hazzard is going into reruns. ”

      “Just think of the physical and intellectual challenge of fixing up the Dunavant place. We’d come away different people. ”

      “You can say that again. It would age us faster than time travel. ”

      “You have no vision. ”

      “Sue me. And now that I’ve said the word, have you considered the legal ramifications of what you want?  Your grandparents passed on the house and land to your mother and aunt ‘in perpetuity’. Know what that means?”

      “Not exactly, but…”

      “Boiled down, the bunch of you own all of it together, but none of you owns any of it individually. Fratricide in perpetuity. Lawsuits in perpetuity. Whoever named it named it well. Arabs and Israelis have had jolly days carving up Palestine compared to loving kinfolk subdividing an inheritance. ”

      When I couldn’t think of a rejoinder to that one, a triumphant Peter went around the house the next few days whistling the theme song from Green Acres. And at risk of being labeled paranoid, I want to say for the record that he can whistle sarcastically. 

      Being a decent person, he did not gloat forever and for my birthday gave me a lifetime membership in the Living History Farm Association, carte blanche to visit any of a number of preserved rural homesteads scattered throughout the nation. 

      Still, he keeps a vigilant eye for signs of unrest so that preventive tactics may be brought to bear. As our anniversary approached, he scoured every software boutique in five counties, and his diligence was rewarded with Cyber-Barn. This he downloaded at once, and I thanked him for his thoughtfulness. 

      “Okay, Bo Peep. You wanted, as I recall, a pretend farm. Well, the joys of intestinal parasites, breech births and scraping the hair off dead hogs are now at your disposal. In the comfort of your own home. Your suburban home. ” 

      I think he's gloating again.