Appalachia!

There’s an instant release that happens when you end a marriage.  First, you weigh the pros and cons.  Sometimes even grid them.  Then you bargain, plea, hope.  And you still come up to the same conclusion.  You’ve been leaving your spouse for years. You tell yourself, he’s there for the kids, for the family.  He is a hard worker.  You once loved them long ago.  But things change.  You change.  And you can’t go back to what was.

Early on, Janel was determined not to be tethered to the clutches of society.  Things that would bind her to a house, a uniform lifestyle or that unnecessary, flatlining and polluting lawn mowing.  What could be more boring than walking up and down a lane cutting grass that someone decided suburbanites must have.  To feel worthy. Or to buy the America’s dream.  It sure wasn’t hers. 

Even reading "The Levittowners"* in college solidified any connection to suburbia she could ever want.  Who wants to live in a carbon copy house, next to carbon copy neighbors, driving a carbon copy car with a carbon copy existence? 

Suburbia comes with a built-in loneliness.  A dissociation from humanity and all that comes with it.  The homogenization of American.  It has a taste. A dull taste.

But that is what she did.  For a lot of years.  A long marriage.  Until she had enough. Of both. And then the magic began. But it didn’t come all at once. Or in a way she thought it might.

*A book that studied a new suburban community in, Levittown, New Jersey.  It is about how people fleeing the city adapt to new ways of being in suburbia.