-------------------------------------------------
My Little Bit of Country

Do you remember you favorite place when you were a child? My favorite place was a playground near where I live, and I LOVED it! I could be there every day at all hours. I was on the verge of tears when I have to go home.
In My Little Bit of Country is Susan Cheever writing about how she felt when she and her family moved from New York to Westchester. She have to move from her favorite place, Central Park. This essay is from 2012.

Susan Cheever describes in her essay her relationship to Central Park in New York. She recollects many good experiences in the park as a kid. She describes the city as a magical place with many options, but her parents want a typical suburban life so they decided to move from their apartment in middle of New York to Westchester, which in outside the city.
Susan Cheever’s relationship to Central Park does not end here, because she commutes to New York as soon as she gets an opportunity to come back to the life she and her family had in New York. Susan Cheever moved back to New York some years after, she had children and she raised them in New York, and they love Central Park as much as Susan Cheever does, and even though they are adults, they still love to celebrate functions in the park. Susan Cheever thinks the life in New York is safe, while the suburban life is a little bit scary.

In the essay, there is a first person narrator and an omniscient narrator, because it is Susan Cheever herself there is the main character in the story and that can be reliable and unreliable. It can be reliable because it is her experiences and her thoughts we hear about, but it can be unreliable because she may have lied or invents it and will not know it.
Susan Cheever uses a lot of adjectives and metaphors, which makes the reading very living and draws the reader’s attention, e.g.: “One night the surface of the water heaved and buckled, and a turtle as big as a small car, a mossy prehistoric apparition in the middle of the city, inhaled the biggest chunk” (ll. 278-283)

There are two themes in this essay growing up and nature vs. culture.
As mentioned Susan Cheever grew up in New York, she wants to live in the city and she wants to raise her children in New York too.
Susan does not like the suburban life and she talks a lot about how sad she was to move from New York, but what is best, the city or the suburbs? Should a child grew up in a city or in the suburbs?
There are pros and cons for both. In the city will children learn many different cultures and they will be more outgoing, but they will also experience drugs, alcohol and violence at an early age. Children who grew up in the suburbs will automatically be more closed, and they will not experience the same cultures as the children in the city, because they are not together with so many people at the same time.

When Susan Cheever describes how she felt when they moved away from New York and Central Park and how she felt forced by her parents to move, she appeals to the reader’s feelings. We get sympathy for Susan and we feel sorry for her: “I did not want to go. I loved my urban school with its fenced-in playground perched above the East River Drive […] Most of all I loved Central Park,” (ll. 90-98).
Susan Cheever talks also about how different she felt, when she does not want to move to Westchester: “I was the lone dissenter. I did not want to go” (ll. 90-91)

Susan Cheever describes New York as a wonderful place and she only uses positive words, when she talks about New York:
“Here the most intense city in the world is forcefully interrupted by some of the most glorious corridors of trees and abundant gardens in the United States” (l. 232-235), and the wonderland called Central Park” (ll. 303-304), and when Susan Cheever talks about the suburban life, she describes it as a very boring place:
“I would wander all I wanted in the suburban woods and try to be interested in the skunk cabbage that bloomed in the spring and the interesting patterns made by rotting logs next to a brook and the jelly blobs of frog’s eggs in the pond, but none of it held a candle to the magnificent variety of the Conservatory Garden or even the rolling land around Cleopatra’s Needle” (l. 145-154)
We get the sense of a very uninteresting place, and she describes it as a suburbia place:” […] the desire to migrate from the magical city to endless driving and tidy little lawns of suburbia” (ll. 85-88).

The biggest contrast in this essay is the culture vs. nature.
Nature is normally described as idyllic and a peaceful place, but Susan Cheever is turning all that upside-down in her essay. The culture is described with words which give the reader positive associations and nature is described with words which give the reader negative associations.
Here is some examples:
Muddy pond crawling with leeches is a contrast to marble basin with splashing clear water, and scrape around the rough dangerous ice is a contrast to glide around the smooth ice
When she says something good about New York, she says something bad about the suburb.

Susan Cheever uses a quote from Andy Warhol to tell where the title comes from: “Later in my life I heard Andy Warhol say that 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 country there was no little bit of city” (ll. 140-144)
In that way she underline her message about the city is more attractive than the suburbs. The title underline also Susan Cheever’s relationship to Central Park.