green acres

I was born and raised in the country -- not a country suburb, but really the country, far from highways, shopping malls, towns of any size. Although we were 2.5 hours' drive from New York (or "the city" as people there called it, as if there were only one) I went there exactly once as a child. It wasn't a place my parents knew about or liked; there was nothing there to attract them. Nonetheless it had an enormous allure for me as a child. I loved stories like "Harriet the Spy" and "The Saturdays" and "Catcher in the Rye"; I envied these fictional city children their urbane outlooks and endless adventures. It seemed to me that all of life, real life, was there. Though surrounded by trees and grass, and not entirely indifferent to nature (I had a thing for Thoreau, too) I mostly lived inside the world of books and my own imagination, and I dreamed of a time when I, too, could live in the city and start real life.
When I was 18, my dreams came true: my parents loaded up the car and took me and my stuff to Barnard to begin my college career. I only now realize how much this must have cost them, not just in money but in worry; why couldn't I be like other people's children; why couldn't I go somewhere civilized like Middlebury or Smith? But they never complained, at least not much, as they undertook what to them must have been the deeply terrifying drive through the Bronx and Harlem to Morningside Heights, to leave me in the wicked city.
I would like to say I took to it immediately, but that is not true. I was overwhelmed and intimidated by the noise and the clamor and the vast strangeness of everything: the smells, the panhandlers, the subways, the strange foods. Living in a dorm on campus and going to school, of course I did not have to deal with many of the most difficult things about life in a city, and yet I would still say it took me a year before I began to feel at home. Before I began to really like it.
Once I began to like it, I loved it. After the first year I lived in college housing that was an apartment, six blocks south of campus. I loved the walk to school every morning, all the teeming life I saw, the stopping to get coffee and drinking it on the steps at Low Library, the walks I would take with friends around the Upper West Side or farther afield. I loved it, and then I graduated, could not find a job, lived precariously subletting a friend's studio apartment on Jane Street, wandering the city that summer, wondering what I would do. And then I found a job, on the other side of the world, and left New York, never suspecting I would not return for a very long time.
So long that I seem a different person now, one who has to get used to the city all over again. And the city is different too; less menancing, but far more expensive.
Last time it took a year to adjust. I wondered when I got here how long it would take this time. And how do you know, when you are adjusted?
Five and a half months here, in some ways, it is already happening, though I would not say the process is complete. Life in the city is a big thing to get used to. Yet I cannot say that I wish myself back in Raleigh. Sometimes I go to Connecticut, to the same house where I grew up reading "Harriet the Spy" and dreaming of city life. It's a wonderful change to be someplace so quiet and calm. The country is full of trees, and the air smells wonderful. I love seeing the stars and fireflies, cows and wild turkeys. Nonetheless I feel isolated and a bit unsettled, out of my element. When I get back in Brooklyn I feel I am home.

Is it possible that Robin has not given herself enough time to adjust? Is she giving up on her dream too soon?