Breaking up with cool cool Austin

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Denton! It's actually happening. We have jobs, we've signed a lease, we move November 1st. Yikes. I had meant to do a thoughtful write up of why we are leaving this wonderful city and pros and cons punctuated by pertinent photos of both towns but! I have two pet monsters who love to eat my to-do lists and poo them out onto my clean laundry.

Instead I am including here a copy of a letter I wrote to a friend months ago in which I discuss the subject using parables and slang.

You were so aghast or possibly incredulous? when I mentioned leaving Austin's warm bosom that I feel like explaining a little more, plus I've been explaining a lot so it will be good to write it down.

If you asked me a couple of years ago if I wanted to leave Austin I made the same face as you did, but since then quite a few of my closest friends have left to seek their fortunes, my babies have gotten older, and my elbows have gotten very cramped in these close quarters. I missed the bus a decade ago when my money savvy friends were furtively buying properties on the east side and I was cocktailing, fooling around in the sculpture studio of ACC and working at the youth hostel. Now Austin is becoming a real city complete with crime, secret millionaires, rapidly disappearing view of the sky and so expensive that all the artists and brown people are being pushed farther and farther outside of town.

If I were single, I would stay forever, I would! But now I have this huge thing that is my family, and here I am trying to cram it into my old single lifestyle. I believe that Austin is the best place in the world to spend your twenties, but now I've outgrown it. The things Austin has to offer are better than ever, but they aren't important to me anymore...a dozen invitations per day to attend rock shows, birthday parties, festivals, fashion shows, mustache competitions, binge drinking contests. I don't even read them anymore. Amazing restaurants, mecca organic grocery stores, vintage boutiques, a bar on every corner. I can't afford any of it, nor do I have the free time to enjoy it if I could.

The things I dream about these days are big trees in which to build forts, an orchard full of fruit, a house that I can really call my own- that I can knock down a wall or paint a mural on without fear of losing my deposit. I want Ruby and Jesse to be able to venture further than ten feet from the front door without being in danger of a car flattening, I want them to have woods and chores and bb guns and food from a garden instead of Fiestamart.

I grew up the poor kid in a privileged school in suburbia because my dad was a graphic designer and my mom stayed home with us. We had a great time with each other but I really felt the lack of "fancy" stuff and "nature" and I don't want the same for my little monsters. Sure I could find a better job than bar work but no thanks if it means somebody else raises my kids.

I feel that kids are very like dogs. You can have dogs in the city, you can pick up their poop with your hand. You can take them on doggy playdates to the doggy park and leave them at doggy daycare and feed them chicken and rice and wash them at Shampooch and send them to doggy obedience school and treat them at the doggy bakery. That doggy would probably be happy. OR you could have two acres on the outskirts of town, pour chow in a bucket and the dog leaps and races and catches squirrels and protects the children and swims in the river and has the time of its life, leash free and on the cheap. I want my kids to be farm dogs, higher quality of life with less fussiness.

Pet donkeys for riding and camping. Chickens, milking goats, studio and cabins for recording albums. Art barn for woodworking, ceramics and large projects, library, gardens, writing and illustrating new children's books. That's our big adventure.

I'm excited but nervous, and every time I get stuck in traffic or pay for parking I snip one more thread that binds my heart to the city.
Ya dig?

ever much
Shayla