prompt: natural, title: a middle path in "city mouse and country mouse, in the suburbs" flash fiction

The cliché, of course, would be that a farm-girl from the outskirts of Cobleskill would adore the outdoors experience while her wife, the city kitty from deepest Westchester, would abhor it. But people are seldom so extreme or uncomplicated in their comforts and interests. Yes, on that farm she developed a respect and admiration for the alfresco (she ended up teaching natural sciences, Christ knows) but it also left her pragmatic about the realities of the grim toil associated with an extended time away from civilization. She appreciated brisk one-hour hikes but found overnight camp-outs rather dull exercises in roughing-it for roughing-it’s sake. Something so performative about it to her, rejecting conveniences just to prove one’s toughness. The human race had taken eons to invent flushable toilets and hot-water taps, who was she to spurn such fine efforts? She milked cows at dawn from the age of eight to eighteen, she’d nothing to prove to Smokey Bear.

Similarly, though her wife grew up a short walk from the Metro North rail-line into Manhattan, she loved the idea of “getting away from it all”, still exotic for her even after years of sharing a home with her beau in the countryside south of Schenectady. Camping was a wonderful change of pace for her, as long as she could bring half her life along for the adventures. Propane stove, radio, cellphone, six changes of clothes. “Glamping”, her wife called it as a gentle tease, so she bought a pop-up trailer and purchased a vanity plate for the damn thing that read “GLMPNG”.

The science instructor and the theatre producer, both as themselves and as a couple, met and did not meet the stereotypes one would assign to their backgrounds or their adult lives, in some great swirl of contradictions and complexity. As we all do. If we’re anything, we are legion, faceted as gems, sometimes showing one side or another, but all of them our true selves at all once, casting light onto the walls in a chaotic glorious madness. As is our way, for whatever few years we get.

Down the road, they found an equilibrium, when one of those plays did better than expected and they had a windfall. A little out-of-the-way summer house (a small shack, really) in the back of a vacation court on Long Island’s North Shore, where the cost was rather dear but not one-tenth as expensive as those Martha Stewartsy shit-heads’ Montauk MacMansions down in the Hamptons.

Tiny kitchen, snug bedroom barely for two, bathroom smaller than a closet. The smell of the sea. Sand tracked in, never quite dispersed. Only five minutes from the farm stands, just fifteen from miniature-golf courses, lousy with pinball machines and great over-flowing gobs of objectively disgusting fried clams. Theirs. Not mere compromise, rather a slice of the overlap in their Venn diagram of complicatedly contradictory interests. Theirs. Not quite city, not quite nature, but for two complicatedly contradictory people, quite perfect for themselves and for each other. Theirs.