The text ”My Little Bit of Country” is an essay written by Susan Cheever in the anthology “Central Park” in 2012. Susan Cheever writes the story in a chronological structure and by this we follow her growing up from the very beginning until the very end where she gets her own children. The story takes place in New York City, and it shows how the urban life is compared to the country life. Trough the story Susan Cheever describes the life as a human in the city and a human in the country. Susan Cheever shows the reader the contrasts between the urban and the country life and how her relationship is to these two contrasts.
At first, Susan Cheever describes all the perfect and lovely memories she has with her family in the urban, she absolutely knows how to make it all looks like it is a perfect and wonderful place to be. Following her life chronological from the beginning till the end gives the reader a more thorough understanding of the history. She introduces the story with telling about the summer mornings in Central Park with her father. “My earliest memories are of summer mornings in Central Park with my father after he came home from fighting the World War 2”. It is very clearly to see that Susan Cheever wants to tell a story about her life and background chronological. By managing the reader chronological through the story we get a more detailed explanation of the main characters life and the reader can actually familiarize with her life.
There are a lot of different meanings about the urban and the country, it is different from people to people. By reading “My little bit of country” you familiarize with Susan Cheever because she uses ethos, and therefore without you know it, suddenly you have changed your mind. You maybe change your meaning about the country or the urban. She heard Andy Warhol said, “it was better to live in the city than the country because in the city he could find a little bit of country, but in the city, there was no little bit of country”. Susan Cheever agrees with that statement, because when she lived in the country for a couple of years she could not find a little bit of city in the country, but when she lived in the city, Central Park, had been her little bit of country and that also says something about her point of view in connection with the country and the urban.
However, humans are totally different and the story shows the reader that there are two different peoples in the world; there is country people and urban people. Some people prefer the country while other people prefer the urban, the reason why Susan Cheever likes the urban more than the country could be that she has grown up in the urban, she has her childhood there and a lot of memories from her life as a little child, that also have a big influence on one’s future life. As mentioned before Susan Cheever had lived in the country for some years with her family. Her parents were tired of all the noise and the apartment in the urban and wanted a real family life. After some years Susan Cheever decided to go back to the urban, and actually she raises her own children in Central Park because she thinks that the urban public spaces are more fabulous than even the most luxurious rural private spaces. She says: “I vowed to let them grow up in the city and never, ever transplant them to the country”.
In this sentence, the reader also gets a feeling of what she likes the most and that is definitely the urban. I think that Susan Cheever is one of these parents who is a little bit scared of the country because she really wants to keep her own children away from it, because she thinks that it is so wrong to raise children in the country. She does not admit that she is scared, but in a way she tries to keep the real nature out of her life and protect her own children from it. “It’s the collision of man and nature, the collaboration of the human and the divine that makes the most poignant landscape”. By this, Susan Cheever means that something is pretty in the country, but she has her own posture about the country and the urban, and she thinks that Central Park is the most delicious of the collisions. She really prefers to keep the nature at a safe distance from her own family life. She prefers the urban life, where you can get both the urban and the country, all in one. As mentioned before, Susan Cheever does not know what it is like to live a safe life in the country. She mentions: “I have to confess that in the real country, far from other people and the cozy hum of electric generators and the clatter of traffic, I am often frightened”. She does not write so many positive things about the country, mostly she writes about how perfect and stunning the urban is, so it is easy to change one’s mind, because the reader does not get so much information about the country, and if it happens it is bad things, so in that way it is also clear to see where Susan Cheever want’s to go and what she likes the most.