The streets of my city

Although we live in a lively city neighborhood, I’m continually surprised by how quiet it is here; Big City only has a population of 127,579 after all. Please, don’t ever think it’s as if we’re living in Chicago or Seoul. Think Cambridge, not Boston proper. The street we live on is a short (one block) one-way cross street so we get very little unnecessary traffic going past. There is a bus route on the main north-south street about 200 meters from our apartment and sometimes I can hear a bus, but the buses run on electricity or natural gas and they’re not very loud; nothing like the cranky old bus that rumbled up and down 16th Street back in D.C. Surprisingly, we hear less traffic here than we did back in Small Village, because in Small Village our house was right along the main road leading into Big City and here we’re on this quiet little-used side street.

Weekends are especially quiet, and on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings I hear the bells of the St. Paulus Kirche five blocks away pealing through the neighborhood.



During the week, if the radio is off and the window open, I can hear the church bells chime the hour. In the mornings, when R is taking care of Small Boy and I am writing in bed with a cup of coffee on the table beside me, I can guess at the weather by how muffled the seven o’clock chimes are. I can hear if they are carrying through crisp clear morning air or if they are pushing their way through rain or fog. Some winter mornings, with snow on the ground and fog in the air, I can only hear them if I listen for them.



On an early spring morning, the loudest thing about our city neighborhood, the thing that woke R and me at the crack of dawn throughout April and May, is the constant chattering of the birds in our courtyard. On a pleasant evening, it is the children of our apartment building playing on the playground out back. It’s easy to have a child in this neighborhood; there are nine children in this building alone and one of my neighbors is pregnant with her second. The bakery around the corner has children’s books and high-chairs and balloons; the butcher gives little slices of sausage to the kids when you shop there (they ask the parent if it’s okay first). I never feel as if I have to make the choice, City or suburb? It’s as if I have both at the same time, and it’s something I will miss keenly if we ever leave Switzerland.