Love of nature
When friends leave town
© Bouldi / Shutterstock
Our author’s friends are drawn to that in abundance right now nature. And she wonders: are they crazy? Time for an urgent warning.
When I meet acquaintances, the first thing I do is look at their hands. Is that dirt under your fingernails? If you then tell with shining eyes about looking for mushrooms in the forest, about the newly created raised bed, about digging up potatoes, I know: I’m about to lose them to nature. They’ve just scoured the city for the best craft beer bars, and now they’re suddenly excited about mulching. From then on it won’t be long before they buy a house in the surrounding area. For the weekend. Or worse: forever. I would love to throw myself in front of the moving truck every time and yell: “Don’t do it!”
Expectation vs. Reality
Because real village life looks different than on Instagram. Anyone who sits on the Manufactum garden bench in front of their Scandi dream house is usually not looking at deer in the clover, but at the neighbors’ 80s brick building. Something from Böhse Onkelz is booming from somewhere at full volume. Always. From where I know this? Because I come from the country myself. When I think back to my youth in a village with 177 inhabitants, I don’t see a coffee table under the apple tree, but a lonely bus stop. And myself, as I pedal to the next small town on my bike, shivering with the cold, powerless against the wind that always went. My seasons were mowing the lawn, mowing more lawns, picking up rotten apples and shoveling snow.
But my friends don’t want to hear that. They say: the healthy air. I say: pollen alarm, mosquitoes and the smell of manure. They say: the silence. I say: the wasteland. They say: in the country everyone knows everyone. I say: right. Bad. They say: Not in the mood for traffic jams anymore. I say nothing. And wait for the moment when they hang behind a tractor that is itching through Wallachia at 25 kilometers an hour.
The “But the kids …” argument
The “But the children …” argument comes as reliably as the cock’s crowing around four in the morning. Yes, of course it’s great when Finn and Emma can wander around in the woods for hours. But at the latest when they are 14, they will first curse the lousy WLAN and then the day on which their parents moved away from Berlin, Cologne or Hamburg. But, hey, supposedly you can get to town very quickly. Or as the people of Neu-Dörfler put it: “I can be at the main train station within 20 minutes.” Always! Do they all live in exactly the same radius around the city?
But the worst traitors are the allotment gardeners. At eleven o’clock “meal!” shout over the fence and trim the box hedge in line: Sorry, but wasn’t it always an unspoken law that we find something like that stuffy? In the meantime, even my punk rock friends have kicked their “anti-establishment” attitude into the rain barrel and disappear into their lots at the weekend. And with them, unfortunately, the good parties too. In the past, people at least danced or argued about politics. Today they exchange tips on ecological snail destruction at the allotment club festival.
Nature and me? It just doesn’t fit.
Of course, I’m a little jealous too. How I would like to get into a state of maximum relaxation while pulling weeds. But it’s just like this: I don’t want to go back to nature, and nature doesn’t feel like me either. Or how else can you explain the fact that while I was watching TV recently, my room palm broke through in the middle and slammed onto the living room table?
I remain confident. It won’t be long before the first urban refugees turn around and return to the asphalt paradise. And when they come back, we drink white wine and scream happily against the street noise. On my balcony. With the dried basil.
This article originally appeared in Barbara issue no. 05/2021.