The Traffic is Insane.

I often get asked how our transition to The Country has gone.

It goes ok.

In all honesty, I miss the Big City and our Wee Little Casa: the memories, the fabulous neighbours, even Big Sister’s school.

The Country.

I feel a fraud when I tell people that we moved to the country. In my mind, ‘the country’ is a place of my childhood 80s envisioning of sleepy, dusty towns and red dirt speckled utes comprising of the local RSL, a pub (or two) and a chinese restaurant. It’s a dreamscape that has pleasant and terrifying memories all rolled into one..in fact, on our roadtrips across the nation to visit family and friends, I insist on a ‘detour’ of sorts to have my favourite 1980s chinese australian dining experience…so it’s like 150km out of the way…so what?!

So worth it.

But that’s not where we have moved. Instead, we have moved to what has been begrudgingly described as a ‘country’ version of what we have just left. We have the delight of some of the most fantastic cafes offering local, biodynamic produce as par for the course, we have a weekly food market that involves me getting all the things we need for the week and spending the next 3 hours chatting with friends and drinking woodfired coffee (yes, that’s a thing), and there are more social activities going on in a week up here (from state and literature festivals and touring music and art exhibitions) than you can poke a stick at. In this (almost) one year that we have lived up here I have never been so social, so busy and so surrounded. Think of the country as idle, gardening bliss: think again yo!

And yet. I miss the dirty, grungy streets of the Big City. I miss the cadnor and brutal nature that is walking through a playground on the way to shops and dodging prone drug addled bodies and telling my children to NOT pick up the crap from the ground. I am twisted.

There is (there must be) something wrong with me.

This all came to a head of sorts after spending a rather glorious (and rare) sunny day in the Big City, visiting some friends and watching the ease in which our kids slotted back in with theirs, those shared memories unrelenting in the face of time passing.

So torn, so very torn. The reasons we decided to pull up stumps in the first place still exist, and this gentle, beautiful town has embraced us and has more than offered what we sought and more.

And yet, as we left the city and slotted into the cars heading north, I found my nostalgia train had gotten up steam and was powering forward.

I made the drive home while Husband the girls slept in the car…we hit peak hour like it was no man’s business. I was left alone with my thoughts and dulcet tones of the radio spewing out some random techno crap [too lazy to change the dial yo] and was wondering when the magic of the place we have moved to would hit me (as it has Husband, and even the girls) and in my quiet inner voice I began to think that maybe it never would, maybe it was simply a process of learning change, of letting go. I wound our way through the quiet country road that takes us home and slowed the car to eighty. No rush, no need.

And that’s when a bloody big kangaroo decided to jump onto the road in front of me.

By some weird-ass miracle ala ‘Matrix’ style everything turned into slow motion and I could see the kangaroo jump into my peripherial vision and skirt the beam from my car’s headlights; my foot off the accelerator and a gentle tap of the brake.

The kangaroo somehow stopped itself on the middle line of the road as our car swept past, and yet its momentum meant that it had to keep hopping in order to stay upright. I decided to slow right down and give it’s way.

Instead of simply jumping across the road as it had obviously originally intended to do, it decided to join me, on my ride home. And so, began our shared journey, he in front, hopping down the road, showing me the way, showing me the sights, while I followed behind; until at last, as the limits of the village before our town came into view, he veered ever so slightly off and up the embankement and back to the darkness of the forest skirting the darkened, sleeping homes.

It was cool, it was precious and it was something unique to this place. Without this move I may never have shared a roadtrip with a kangaroo at the helm.

So, I suppose when people ask what the move to the country has been like, I could just tell them the truth: The Traffic is Insane.