Article content I have always been a city person. As a child, I suffered from hay fever, lasted less than a week at summer camp and caught cold any time I slept in a tent. By adulthood, I had become hardwired to crave the restaurants, shopping, nightlife and general buzz of the urban environment. As the saying goes, you can’t plug a hairdryer into a tree. In the past year, however, two events have radically changed my perspective. The first was the pandemic. Suddenly, the city was the worst place to be. Downtown neighbourhoods were overrun with apartment dwellers desperate to escape their four walls. Every trip to the store felt fraught with virus anxiety.