This summer my life changed. I moved from my apartment downtown to a one-bath, two-bedroom bungalow about a fifteen-minute drive from practically everything. I traded the city for suburbs and now I have to get in my car to go anywhere. What kind of nightmare am I living in?
Last summer, the transition to Chattanooga was cushioned by the joy of finally living in the same city as my partner. This summer, I have been out of town so much, the suburban lifestyle has snuck up on me. My daily morning walks to get out in nature and feel the sun on my face have been so joyful. My quiet mornings eating breakfast on the back deck, monitoring my vegetable garden fill my heart. Opening the blinds to let the sun beam into my living room and closing them at night has become a sweet, essential part of my routine.
But it was hard enough to adjust to living in a downtown so different from downtown Chicago. Chattanooga is a large city, certainly, and my apartment was located right next to Main Street. I could still easily walk to many coffee shops, restaurants, even the gym or grocery store if necessary. But now, the only store within walking distance is a Kum N Go on the corner of a busy street. If I’m going anywhere for coffee, gym, the grocery, I have to drive. And parking in the furthest spot away in the parking lot is not scratching my walking-everywhere-itch.
I don’t hate living in the suburbs. It’s just that I grew up living in the suburbs. When I was five, we moved from the incredibly cool, up-and-coming neighborhood of West Asheville to Kenilworth Lake—the “wrong” side of Kenilworth – about ten minutes from downtown Asheville. We grew up driving to church, holding our breath through the tunnel under Beaucatcher Mountain to get downtown. Today, almost twenty years later, my fiancé and I moved our stuff from downtown Chattanooga to the Belvoir neighborhood—although friends have called it the “bad” side of Belvoir—and we hold our breath through the tunnel under Missionary Ridge to get downtown.
Returning to the suburbs feels almost like retreating, like I’ve been stepping away and away and away from the city living experience I used to dream of. When I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at age thirteen, the dream of living in New York City imprinted upon my psyche. When I read Goodbye to All That at age nineteen, the dream of living in Southern California took its place. When I watched The Last Dance, the award-winning documentary about the Chicago Bulls, the dream of living in Chicago began to solidify. I never watched or read anything that made me dream of living in Chattanooga. I certainly never dreamed of living fifteen minutes, through a tunnel, and down the ridge from Chattanooga.
What I did dream of was the life I would get to live in Chattanooga. With my fiancé. The life I pictured with him happened in the mountains, on hikes, someplace outside. I imagined we would have a garden. I dreamt up this whole life with him before we even started dating, before I knew that in real life, we would rent this house and it would have raised beds in the back.
I pictured him coming home from work, smelling warm from the sun like a cat. In my mind, he wears lots of denim and I grow my hair even longer than his. I practice braiding his long curls to replicate on my own head—braids I’ll teach our children if we have them one day. In my dreams, we reap too much zucchini from our garden so we take the extra to church and I send him to work with the rest and I make zucchini bread in our sun-soaked kitchen. We eat it at the summit of our weekly hike. We walk down the mountain for coffee and he hugs me so tight he squishes all my broken pieces back together.
My dreams look a little different than they did at thirteen. In many ways they are the same. I wrote a bucket list before my thirteenth birthday and stuck it in a time capsule to open when I turned twenty-five (when my brain fully developed). “Get married” wasn’t on there, but “love and be loved back” was. I’m not living my city dream right now, but I am living and loving a different one.
Carlisle Patete (‘22) came to Calvin University from the mountains of North Carolina and graduated with a double major in film & media and creative writing. After brief stints in Los Angeles and Chicago, she now resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she enjoys sweet tea on her front porch and identifying every tree and bird she runs into on any hiking trail.
