Stop and smell the roses

“Something smells really great out here! Like laundry detergent!” I said. The smell was light and aromatic, like fragrance.

“I don’t think that’s laundry detergent,” Matt replied. It was ten in the evening and we were taking a stroll through his neighborhood.  The night was unusually warm for the middle of December.

“No? What is it then?”

Matt laughed. “Flowers…”

Had I really forgotten what flowers smelled like?

“You haven’t left the city in a while!” Matt said.

He was right. I hadn’t left the city since you and I drove to Lake Tahoe with Imri and Thai; that was the last time my shoes caught any dirt in their treads.  “I really haven’t left the city,” I said, bewildered. Lake Tahoe was…four months ago?

Matt lives in the suburbs of Citrus Heights, about thirty minutes east of Sacramento. He works as some kind of engineer for some kind of techy company in Folsom (you can tell I pay attention to details), and his hobbies include lazy house repairs and shooing stray cats out of his backyard. I’ve only seen him four times now, once when we met for frozen yogurt, once in the middle of the summer when I accompanied him to a local pear fair, and twice in the late evenings for impromptu treks around his neighborhood (we were currently on that second trek).  All four of these meetings were as far from downtown Sacramento as reason would allow.

“How sad it must be to be you,” he teased me. “Study…work. Don’t you do anything else, city girl?”

When I first moved to Sacramento two years ago, I avoided downtown and midtown out of principle and only wandered into the Grid when a social gathering mandated my presence.  I turned up my nose at the high-rise corporate buildings clustered downtown and thought about how depressing it would be to stare at nothing but glorified brick boxes all day long.  The buildings were all so close together, so that only narrow alleys separated one establishment from another, and where there weren’t any buildings, there was cracked pavement and vehicles in a hurry.  There was no beauty in any of this, I used to think, desperately.  My eyes longed for the bright green of a grass field or the epic silhouette of a distant mountain range.  If anything, I considered myself a tree-hugging nature lover then.

Fast-forward to two years later, and I can’t imagine living anywhere outside of a major metropolitan area.  Living in the city gives me – and every other twenty, thirty and forty-something year old – somewhere to be every Friday night, and something to do.  When I step into a club, pub or restaurant, I become part of a group of people that is experiencing, with some variation of course, the same kind of evening I am experiencing, and that makes me feel human.  Someone at the pub will notice a sparkle in my eye, or the way my tunic hangs loosely over one shoulder.  Someone else will note that I look just like his sister or cousin or friend of a friend. In a way, living in a major metropolitan area provides foolproof camaraderie whenever you choose to seek it out.

But ultimately, I do strive for some balance. I seek out Matt for a reason, after all, and it is largely because he lives away from the city in suburbs that happen to be surrounded by trails and trees.

“You should take more frequent breaks and come smell the roses with me on a hike sometime,” Matt said. “There are some nice hiking trails about 45 minutes from here.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “But no teasing if you find me looking around for a laundry room in the middle of a mountain pass.”

- Leila

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