Greenacres, It’S The Place For Her

Greenacres is the place to be Farm livin’ is the life for me Land spreadin’ out so far and wide Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside The theme song played over and over in my head as we moved into our newly built Greenacres home in December of 1985.

I stood at my living room windows and admired the mountains and fields and, across the street, I saw cows! How had we managed to end up in the middle of a sitcom?!

New York is where I’d rather stay I get allergic smelling hay I just adore a penthouse view Darling, I love you but give me Park Avenue Not so long earlier, we had been living in New York City. I hung out in a Lower East Side tenement with my husband, George, and members of his punk rock band. It hardly resembled an uptown penthouse, but there was no denying it - New York was where we would rather stay.

As we drank our $1.09-a-six-pack beer, we debated life, politics and art - and frequently, the quality of a certain television show. The bass player, Joe O’Hara, maintained that “Greenacres was arguably the best show in the history of television.” No matter how many times we tried to shout him down, Joe insisted, “Greenacres is the best.”

Granted, the punk rock scene was not a hotbed of sophistication, but we were certainly too sophisticated to allow this cab driver from New Jersey to tell us that Greenacres was art!

After the realization that The Works were not going to be cutting that gold record any time soon, we “sold out” and moved to Eastern Washington, where I had grown up.

Following a year in an apartment on the South Hill, we built a house on a new cul-de-sac in Greenacres. Ours was the fourth house on Tschirley Court. The neighbors were friendly and we all grew to know each other by name.

The empty lot next to our house consisted of a mountain of dirt (from the hole our house now sat in) and an apple tree. On occasion, cows and horses moseyed around a large field across the street. Railroad tracks of a bygone era snaked past our dead end street. It seemed pretty rural to this big city family!

The chores…

When we tried to put in our yard and plant trees, bushes and flowers, George and I felt like real farmers. Rocks were our enemy.

Each excavated stone was accompanied by the whine, “Tell me again why we left Manhattan, why we bought a house and why, really, why do we need a yard?”

I believe that I, the Washingtonian, asked these questions more frequently than my New Yorker husband who seemed to almost enjoy the novelty of soil (as opposed to dirt).

Now we laugh at the memory of the Hales trying to till the earth. Our neighbors will tell you that, to their dismay, we’ve virtually given up on gardening and, at its best, our back yard looks like a jungle. We even hire someone to mow our front yard

… The stores …

And Greenacres? It really isn’t all that different from what our New York friends imagine. If we could get them out here, we would dine at one of Greenacres’ largest restaurants, where the owners know us by name and could probably serve us without even taking our order. We would visit the video store that hands out calendars each December with hillbilly cartoons, reserves movies and supports the local elementary school with free rentals for students who excel.

It is not unusual for me to find mail in my post office box which has been addressed simply “Deborah Lawrence Hale, Greenacres, Washington.” Store clerks comment when something different appears in our baskets.

… Fresh air …

It is evening and I stand on my deck, admiring the sunset. I breathe deeply the sweetness of spring, the newly mown grass (not ours!), the freshness of a quick rain. And, although I love the comforting smell of burning fireplace wood, I can’t argue with those who embrace the brief respite from smoke - this time between winter indoor burning and late summmer grass burning. Greenacres is not always the home of fresh air, but while it’s here we breathe it deep.

… Times Square …

Alice, my 12-year-old daughter, is getting ready to enter Greenacres Junior High School in the fall. Her 16-year-old brother, Morgan, is counting the days until he graduates from high school and can set out to New York and an acting career.

But as Oliver Wendell Douglas and George X. Hale would say:

You are my wife

Goodbye city life

Greenacres, we are there!