So I never realized what a city mouse I actually was until a tall, handsome, dashing stranger—the kind we’d all order up from Design-a-Man.com if we could bring ourselves to believe they really existed—invited me to sleep (chastely) with him under the stars in a bower of love and peace (just like Tristan and Isolde, only without the sword and, well, the adultery), and my reaction was not an enraptured, “Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!” (which a cute guy actually said to me earlier this year when I asked him out on a date). It was to cringe and even take a half-step backward and say: “W-w-won’t there be … bugs?”

Yep. That’s what I said.

City mouse.

But a sport nonetheless. I squared my shoulders, summoned up my most dazzling Southern belle smile, said, “Ah-ah-are … you sure?”

Being assured that he, indeed, was, I suffered to recline in the bower of love and peace, stuffing down my misgivings as I kicked off my jeans, and … was most pleasantly surprised. I can even testify that—between the tarp and the blankets and sleeping bags, the unheard-of-for-July-in-Virginia sub-70-degree temps, and the fairy carpet of stars stretching out overhead—Isolde never had it so good.

And that ominous crashing in the underbrush that woke me up at 4 a.m.? Well, that just made me snuggle just a wee bit harder against the broad shoulders of the dashing stranger … which, now that I think about it, is probably what he had in mind all along.

The girlfriends, city mice one and all, were thrown into transports when they heard about this escapade.

“Oh, my God! He made you a bower under the stars!” said Marcia. (Alas, as much as I’d like to claim it, the word bower was not original with me.) “That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard!”

“Easy for you to say,” I thought to myself, recalling the last time I’d idly floated the idea that we take a summer hike through the rolling Virginia hills. Her response then was more like: “Sunblock! At least 70 SPF, don’t you think? And oh my God! Ticks! I know Deet’s illegal, but shall you bring it or should I?”

Of course, I don’t mean to scoff. We all are one and all of us city mice. Some of us may have a fleeting romance with the Green World. We patronize farmer’s markets. Talk knowledgeably about heirloom tomatoes with our chums. Tout the benefits of free-range eggs. Perhaps even dare make herbal teas with what’s growing in the back forty. I certainly for quite some time liked to imagine myself as some kind of budding artist-cum- goddess of the cottage garden a la Gertrude Jekyll or Anne Spencer.

But the fact of the matter—proven by the fact that it only took 18 months of dissertating to utterly wreck my garden—is that that is a flimsy fantasy. The reality is, I’m a city mouse.

It’s a tiny city—just ten square miles—but I love it passionately because, within its environs, I have everything I need. I live smack between the university and the Downtown Mall, where I currently work. I can walk to either, but if it’s hot or raining or I’m feeling lazy, the city bus line is sixty seconds from my door, and the university bus only a two-, possibly a three-minute walk.

No, there’s no chain grocery store within walking distance. But on Wednesdays and Saturdays between April and October, there’s the Farmer’s Market. And other seasons, there’s Integral Yoga, run by lovely bunch of hippie, vegetarian Buddhists who also have an ashram in nearby Buckingham County—or if I’m looking for a bargain, there’s Cville Market, which has cheeses, wine, and locally produced meats in addition to the best prices on produce in town.

For real bakery bread, there’s BreadWorks, in the strip shopping center one block from my front door. The chocolate muffins with butter cream icing, I have it on good authority, are actually made with crack.

There’s also the best coffee in town, Shenandoah Joe’s, two stores beyond that. Reid’s, a few blocks in the other direction is a locally owned grocery with real, live butchers. And there are fish markets, an organic butcher, an Italian products market, the finest local and imported cheeses within all walking distance or a short drive away.

Clothes! I see you think you’ve got me there. You gotta have a mall, or at least a Marshall’s, for clothes, you’re thinking. Well, actually, no.

Sure, I could go to the mall and buy something new from J. Crew. But where’s the challenge in that? I’d much rather find a fabulous men’s tuxedo shirt at the Twice as Nice (next to the bakery), get the saleswoman at Martin’s Hardware (on the other side of the bakery) to help me pick out fancy bolt caps to use as studs, then shimmy into a mini and my Lucchese cowboy boots for an evening of dining, live music and dancing on the Downtown Mall…  A five-mile drive to the county mall for a little light shopping and Starbucks, well, it sounds downright dull by comparison, don’t you think?

For years I’ve said everything I need, everything I could even imagine wanting, is within the ten square miles of the city limits of Charlottesville…

OK, so the Pet Food Discounters is not within the city limits of Charlottesville, but cat food is expensive and I only have to drive out there once a month…

And all right! There’s one other thing that’s not in the city limits of Charlottesville…  The guy. And the bower under the stars.

Yes, that guy. You knew we were getting back to him.

If I’m city mouse, he is indubitably, indisputably, one hundred percent country. Intimate with heavy machinery. Uses words like “tractor” and “bush hog” in casual conversation. Digs stumps and builds stone walls. Fixes things—including his own trucks and, in 15 minutes, my front gate, which had been sagging off its hinges for two years. Knows every tree, every shrub, every flower, every by-gosh weed in the field by its Latin name.

Is a bit obsessed with football.

But also loves history.

And poetry.

No, really. Poetry.

So, I’m spending a lot more time these days watching swallows swoop in and out of the barn as I drink my morning coffee.

…finding patches of blackberries and fences to sit on while I eat them off the vine.

…noting the trees where the goldfinches have built their nests.

…watching my fella fish frogs out of the dog’s water bowl.

…getting to know the ways of chickens—there are 120 of them in the barn, and did you know they’ll eat anything?

…walking around, talking and holding hands with a guy who can tuck me under his armpit and kiss me on top of my head.

…and feeling the fears and stresses of 18 months of dissertating, living off an ever-dwindling store of stipend and savings, getting done just in time to watch every academic job I might have imagined applying for vanish like a puff of Virginia fog in the blaze of a little thing called the worldwide economic meltdown, working shit jobs for no money, losing ground, losing hope—just feeling all that kind of … fall away as we explore this this unexpected but oh-so-very-welcome … whatever it is you call when a woman of fifty starts falling for a guy who’s precisely her age.

There’s no denying the situation presents … challenges. Last Saturday morning, for example, I was at the farm doing what I always do on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee curled up with a book (Flaubert’s Egyptian journals; the library at the farmhouse is simply not to be believed) when an incredible rattling and banging made me look up to the sight of the guys from the farm next door driving past the house in an enormous red truck, pulling an even more enormous red trailer, which contained the largest blackest Black Angus bull I’d ever seen. Word of God it was every bit as big as a Volkswagen bus, if not even bigger. I had to go out on the porch just to gawk.

The guys in the truck spotted me and waved. I waved back … and caught a glimpse of my beautifully manicured nails, painted stop-traffic red. They were so out of context I had to stop and stare at them a moment. And my eyes kept moving down, down to my designer flip-flops and my matching stop-traffic-red toes…

Now farm boy doesn’t just tolerate my little vanities, the hard-learned and hard-earned wiles of the Southern version of the girly-girl—he downright adores them. Marvels at the notion that a woman would take the time and trouble to match her blouse color with her fingers and toes. Pays tribute with kisses and compliments. Which I, in turn, adore. Every performance must have its audience, after all.

…But I think a truer gauge of the distance we’re trying to bridge might be found in the eyes of Laura, the 73-year-old widow who’s his best friend. Laura—a woman with nearly a thousand acres who’s raised crops of children, Thoroughbred horses, heirloom tomatoes, chickens, and heaven knows what all else— looks at me with liking and affection, but also puzzlement, as if I were some kind of exotic bird who’d shown up at the feeder. Decorative, without a doubt, and such a lovely song, I see her thinking—but now that she’s fluttered out of her cage, can she make it in the wild?

Lana, so kind, so wise. I don’t think she’s quite sure.

I’m trying to remember how the story of the city mouse and the country mouse went. The details escape me—something about a great meal in the city, then getting chased by a cat, the country mouse declaring the city sucked and lighting out for the territory … Not a happy-ever-after tale, in other words.

But I have high hopes for me and farm boy. He’s got a great lap for lap-sitting and a chest that, even when I wear my tallest shoes, is just the right height for a cheek to rest on. He’s got a great truck for riding around and looking at the gardens he’s designed. He’s kind and funny and sexy—and just as good at wine and conversation as he is at wrestling stumps out of the ground. He is, in fact, the guy I would have ordered from Design-a-Man.com, if I could have brought myself to believe that such a paragon could actually exist.

So who cares that, on paper, this does not quite compute? I am starting to relax about the bugs.

Allow me to repeat that: I. am. starting. to. relax. about. the. bugs.

That may sound like a small step to you. But, trust me, it’s a giant step for girly-girl-kind.