Country Mouse, City Mouse

Sat down to blog this morning and saw the neighborhood kids walking to the bus stop. Felt a nagging little guilt... then a conversation I'd have sworn I dreamed came back to me.

Him: Blah blah late, blah blah yadda snow blah driveway.

Me (pre-alarm clock): Hhnnnh?

Him: Just remember blah blah something throttle blah blah choke yadda yadda prime.

Me: Unnh.

(Sidebar: I've known how to get a pull engine going since I was about 5 and got my first dirt bike. But somehow that information is unavailable to me when it comes to starting the lawnmower or snowblower, hence the pre-dawn lesson.)

So I abandoned my blog to engage in my least-favorite alternate cardio activity: snow removal. And I don't care what anyone says - even with the mother-of-all-freakin'-snowblowers (how we acquired this monster is a story in itself) - it takes 1-2 hours, I break a sweat and nearly every muscle in my body is sore the next day from wrestling a machine that outweighs me, so I count it as a workout.

This whole snow removal thing is new to me. First time in my life I've had a paved driveway and sidewalks, let a lone a city ordinance that requires it. But honestly, I could give a rat's ass about the city ordinance - I do it because of the neighbors.

We're already the "house with the scary dog" (she barks her head off and tries to jump the fence when people go by, so they're not coming close enough to find out she's actually a teddy bear) and the "why don't they have kids" house. I'm sure it won't be long before we become the "did you hear they can't have kids" house. Or probably the "they adopted from (insert foreign country)" house. My husband even overheard one kid saying to another "he's that bad man" (thankfully the kid, our next door neighbor, said "that's not a bad man, that's Scott." This was shortly after my husband took to shaving his head, so we can only assume the kid associates the bald thing with bad guys.) I am also the "best Halloween decorations" house, but turns out that's a bad thing to uptight people. I didn't want to add to the growing list of neighborhood whispers the "they never clear the walks" house. Cause the thing is, due to a real estate fiasco the likes of which have seldom been seen, when we were finally able to purchase our second house 2 years ago the only 4 left on the market in our range were corner lots. So we're not only on the (ugh) corner, we're on the corner with the bus stop. Not that I mind the kids one bit - I don't. I kind of dig it when I see them running around my front yard on sunny afternoons after the bus lets off. I'm even planning to landscape that corner of our yard with a shade tree and bench for the mommy brigade. But until then I feel like I have to prove something to our neighbors who have so far only gotten the worst possible impressions of us.

I especially feel guilty when my next door neighbor, with his dinky little snowblower, clears the walk all the way from his house to our corner so his kids don't have to walk in the snow. I make a point of clearing his walk for him when I can beat him to it. But then of course I always wonder if he expects me to clear the walk, what if I'm in a hurry and can't do it, will he think I'm snubbing him somehow? Don't want to screw up getting along with them, because already have a disastrous relationship with the house behind us, even though we've gone out of our way to try to make friends with them. I clear their walks too.

This whole neighborhood politics thing, I dunno but I'm pretty sure I don't like it. I grew up in the country - our closest neighbor was a farm a quarter mile down the gravel road. The closest kid to play with was a half mile. We were on a township road, which meant the road grader didn't remove our snow, which could be 3 feet deep. If we couldn't get the half mile to the bus stop we'd miss school, and it didn't count as snow days. Our neighbors even took us to the bus on their snowmobiles once. My dad has pulled the mail lady out of snow banks with the tractor more than once. Guess what I'm saying is, where I come from, it's not a question of who likes whom or favors or anything - it was a rough place to be and no matter what you could 100% count on getting a helping hand. The kind of place where, if you pass another vehicle on the road you wave, because even if you don't know them, they know you or they're going somewhere who knows you. There were no "but he didn't clear his walks" type politics.

I've lived in Chicagoland for going on 11 years now and I guess the old saying is true: you can take the girl out of the country...