Eight weeks in, but who's counting?

I have lived in Cary, North Carolina for eight weeks. Making comparisons to the Colorado life I left behind are as inevitable as the heaping helpings of sugar in the tea around here; unless one specifically requests otherwise, it happens automatically.

I’ll forego the more obvious climactic comparisons. While we happily turned the calendar page on the hottest and driest August in state history last week, I will be the merrier in say, March, when my Colorado friends are running out of ideas for snow day kids crafts and my children are enjoying outdoor birthday parties. After the move I was happy to loose my ever-present lip balm and hand cream; I was not thrilled to have to replace it with bug spray and a gallon-sized bottles of hair spray. But surely, the differences are not restricted to things that are better left to the National Weather Service...


I do so appreciate the fact that unlike Colorado, there are plenty of restaurants in North Carolina not owned by someone whose last name is LLC. Mom and Pop do exist and appear to be living in harmony with just enough chain-eateries to calm my children's fears that we had moved to the moon. Here it is common to find bakeries existing outside of a supermarket and the ones that do smell just the like tiny one in my New Jersey hometown that still makes better jelly donuts than Dunkin or Krispy or any of the big guys. The suburban Raleigh pizza is thin and crusty and most often hand tossed by someone whose name is Frank. These little nods to my east coast sensibility welcome me like a full arm embrace.



In head-to-head comparisons I find Denver and Raleigh quite evenly matched. Both have year-round schools, for Pete's sake! What we forego in professional sports watching opportunities here we gain in top-tier NCAA match ups. Denver's Childrens and Art museums and zoo are world-class; Highlands Ranch has a better library system and community center offerings. Raleigh is a short drive to the beach. Yep, that's evenly matched to me!


My first examination of a North Carolina map left me wondering, however, as to the extent of North Carolinians' creative abilities. Raleigh was named for a man who never visited; Durham's tag line is "The City of Medicine" (?????). My husband and I challenge ourselves to keep straight Greensboro, Greenville and Goldsboro. Hey, some people do Suduko...


The planners in my new home town of Cary, however, had a sense of humor and it isn't lost on me. When coming up with names for the mighty neighborhoods they were building, they were less likely to rely on their surroundings for inspiration; I fear that developers in Colorado may have been threatened to do so. While Highlands Ranch and the surrounding areas stocked their maps with Mountain Vista Drives and Cresthill Lanes, the Cary city planners were definitely working outside the box.




My first case in point is the luxury neighborhood known as McGregor Downs. With street names like Edinburgh Drive and St. Andrews Court, you can almost picture the rolling green Scottish countryside. Of course, Braveheart couldn't have survived this heat in a woolen tartan kilt, but the developers didn't let that stop them. Fantastic!



The tennis craze of the 70's no doubt influenced the developers of the Cary neighborhood known as Wimbledon. With streets names for tennis champions of the recent past, I can't wait for the day when I attend a party at Wimbledon. An ivory engraved invitation I instruct me to Drive down (Jimmy) Connors Circle, past (Rene) Lacoste Lane. If you've reached (Andre) Agassi Court, you've gone too far! Wouldn't it be fun to order from a catalog if you lived there? "Yes, that's 123 Lendl Street. That's right, Lendl, as in Ivan." Are the houses on (Chris) Evert Place more delicate and less physically imposing than those on Martina (Navratilova) Way? For someone who logged time every July 4th in her friend Marion’s TV room so she could keep one eye on the town parade and another on the Wimbledon Semi-final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, I find the possibilities fascinating!



I have spent far too much of the last eight weeks driving in cirlces, making illegal u-turns and arriving at the wrong destinations, armed with only an outdated map and a sense of wonder as my guide. But as I explore Cary's streets and my new North Carolina home I am grateful for its whimsy!