My Dreaded 4 Minute Drive
It must be the way I grew up. All my friends and schoolmates had neighbors. I never had neighbors. I was driving home from working one night, in the dark after closing It was almost eleven o’clock. It was a short 4 minute drive, but I dreaded going home. I started reflecting how the houses I’ve lived in were always at least 20 minutes away from town, but surrounded by golden fields smack dab in the middle of the country where all I could hear at night is silence and the stars in the sky were so brilliant it took my breath away. All I could hear in the middle of the day were birds and small bugs that would only occasionally show themselves. I was happy there. I was happy in the place where I could run out to my car …show more content…
The laws there were only the rules we made for ourselves. Although, I remembered the nights driving home after work back then. I was tired, and those 20 minutes almost felt like 50. I remembered having to constantly run back and forth from my house into town. It was an inconvenience, a waste of gas. But I then considered the house we just moved into, small two bedroom house a block away from the railroad tracks, only surrounded by dull street lights that made the sky seem foggy and other houses no different than the ones next to them. Because our old house was so far away, we needed to pay tuition for school, we wasted gas everyday, and we were having problems with our landlord and the fact that he would never plow our snowy lane or do something about the mold in the bathroom. So, we moved to a place with cheaper rent, in the middle of town. This was a good thing, my mother assured us. I was never too excited. At night, the train would shake our house, sometimes waking me from a deep sleep. We would hear aggravating police sirens that bugged me more then than it ever had before. Barking dogs used to be fairly innocent, but they now just added to …show more content…
My mom used to spend a lot of time hanging out in the garage with her friends, smoking and drinking and laughing. She wasn’t used to having to be quiet, and this caused her to certainly not care what people thought of her. She never really needed to. My father came to visit us once. My mother and he were fighting about one thing or another and they were howling. (As dysfunctional, divorced parents do). I didn’t notice how bad they could scream, actually until I was embarrassed because all the neighbors could hear. I grew up being able to scream as loud as I could and have bonfires in my backyard until 2am and sleeping silently into late afternoon. These are things I didn't know I had taken for granted until I lost them. I was doomed to have to get used to this new way of life because I know it will be a long time before I can have that amount of privacy again, and that hurts to accept. It must have been the way I grew up that made me not like living in town, even in the slightest. I started thinking about how the long drive would be worth just being able to walk into my house in silence with no fear that people can see me and I could actually feel at home instead of feeling like I shared a front yard,
It must be the way I grew up. All my friends and schoolmates had neighbors. I never had neighbors. I was driving home from working one night, in the dark after closing It was almost eleven o’clock. It was a short 4 minute drive, but I dreaded going home. I started reflecting how the houses I’ve lived in were always at least 20 minutes away from town, but surrounded by golden fields smack dab in the middle of the country where all I could hear at night is silence and the stars in the sky were so brilliant it took my breath away. All I could hear in the middle of the day were birds and small bugs that would only occasionally show themselves. I was happy there. I was happy in the place where I could run out to my car …show more content…
The laws there were only the rules we made for ourselves. Although, I remembered the nights driving home after work back then. I was tired, and those 20 minutes almost felt like 50. I remembered having to constantly run back and forth from my house into town. It was an inconvenience, a waste of gas. But I then considered the house we just moved into, small two bedroom house a block away from the railroad tracks, only surrounded by dull street lights that made the sky seem foggy and other houses no different than the ones next to them. Because our old house was so far away, we needed to pay tuition for school, we wasted gas everyday, and we were having problems with our landlord and the fact that he would never plow our snowy lane or do something about the mold in the bathroom. So, we moved to a place with cheaper rent, in the middle of town. This was a good thing, my mother assured us. I was never too excited. At night, the train would shake our house, sometimes waking me from a deep sleep. We would hear aggravating police sirens that bugged me more then than it ever had before. Barking dogs used to be fairly innocent, but they now just added to …show more content…
My mom used to spend a lot of time hanging out in the garage with her friends, smoking and drinking and laughing. She wasn’t used to having to be quiet, and this caused her to certainly not care what people thought of her. She never really needed to. My father came to visit us once. My mother and he were fighting about one thing or another and they were howling. (As dysfunctional, divorced parents do). I didn’t notice how bad they could scream, actually until I was embarrassed because all the neighbors could hear. I grew up being able to scream as loud as I could and have bonfires in my backyard until 2am and sleeping silently into late afternoon. These are things I didn't know I had taken for granted until I lost them. I was doomed to have to get used to this new way of life because I know it will be a long time before I can have that amount of privacy again, and that hurts to accept. It must have been the way I grew up that made me not like living in town, even in the slightest. I started thinking about how the long drive would be worth just being able to walk into my house in silence with no fear that people can see me and I could actually feel at home instead of feeling like I shared a front yard,