I moved here in the spring. I had lived in cities continuously for nineteen years, and the move was not strategic; the rent in the city had simply become absurd, and a friend mentioned a house. The house was small. The town was smaller. I have been here eight months.
The thing I did not expect was the silence. Not the absence of noise (there is plenty of noise: the wind, the river two blocks over, the kids on bikes, the truck that delivers propane on Tuesdays). The silence I mean is the absence of the ambient cognitive load the city had been imposing for two decades. I had not realised it was there until it stopped.
I will not pretend this is for everyone. I miss the city, in the specific way you miss something you have not finished with yet. But I write better here, and I read more, and I have started cooking again, and on most evenings the sky is bigger than I remember skies being. That seems worth a letter.