I found myself saying taco the other day as “tacko,” rather than “tahco,” the way I normally say it. It just slipped out.

I shuddered. That’s how Chris says it. This is what married life does to you. He says tacko. As in tacky. I say tahco, of course. Like all decent people.

He says pasta, to rhyme with masta. Every time it makes me wince. I say pahsta. Of course. Everyone should say pahsta. I tell the kids not to be like Daddy.

Freud called the “narcissism of small differences” the paradoxical fact that the closer a relationship, family or community, the more likely the people in it are to engage in terrible feuds and mutual ridicule, becoming oversensitive to inconsequential differences. 

Such narcissism is the whole glorious premise of films like Mean Girls, an instant classic when it came out and which has just been remade.

Superficial differences are of course everything in life, especially after high school. They define the in group and the out, the hot and the not, the up and the down, the new and the old, the good and the bad. Oscar Wilde made a career out of them, ridiculing and reinforcing all at once. 

And then there’s the Hatfields and the McCoys, to get right into it, forever.

For me, one of the great things about moving out of Toronto was moving out of its map of distinctions, which in the city take the form, not of primitive, tribal warfare, but of a perpetual assertion of status, of one’s superiority over all the people with whom one must live, cheek by jowl.

I know people who constructed an entire identity around their refusal to take the subway. Or who would not shop at Costco, because everyone else did. 

In the city every square foot is a socioeconomic minefield. Every corner is either fashionable or not, and in a very particular way. When I first arrived, I kept tripping up, not quite understanding the significance of North Toronto, or how absolute a border Spadina Avenue is. The right neighbourhoods were clearly defined. And yet still, at every dinner party, the exact definition of the Annex came up for discussion once again.

Chris and I lived in a lovely old neighbourhood, full of older houses. Ours was marketed as a “tear down,” which is how wealthy, business-class Torontonians refer to century homes. We snapped it up with everything we had. One person’s tear-down is another’s castle. It was full of old wood and stained glass and had multiple staircases.

A lot of Toronto money believes in newness as a form of distinction. Luckily, among the teachers and the arty classes, who earn less, oldness is in.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift lampooned centuries of conflict between the Protestants and Catholics in England in his creation of Lilliput’s “big endians” and the “little endians,” factions who differed over which end of the egg was better for breaking.

Our new neighbourhood, we soon discovered, was divided into big housians and little housians. We, of course, were little housians. Our house was not little — we had five kids at home at the time (tremendously unfashionable, by the way, no matter where you live; one of my very best friends here in the County once asked me if I was Amish) — but it was not quite the thing. I found this out at the neighbourhood book club, where the big housians hived off to discuss the best private schools and the little housians were left to themselves, looking sadly at the tahcos.

I thought it was probably naive to think I could escape this net of endless insignificance by moving to the country. Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, about a gang of 80-somethings who live in a retirement home and solve crimes, introduces the characters in terms of the size and location of their suites. The ringleader has, naturally, a three-bedroom.

Class distinction in England: everywhere, all the time, to the grave. How, I thought, could it be different here?

Yet I have found it is hard to get too worked up about what is in and what is out when surrounded by cows, fields, and forests. Other possibilities come instead. There is beauty everywhere here, beauty that costs nothing, and is there for the taking, everywhere you look, all the time. It belongs to everyone.

This egalitarian backdrop shifts the terrain. One’s vain little claims to differ start to seem what they are, insignificant. One’s self seems little in comparison to all this, this vast landscape, the sheer labour it demands, the way it outlasts us all.

Of course, the County has its distinctions. We will never be County, for example, truly belonging here. The same deep sense of place and time that draws us in also excludes. That’s part of its power.

And of course there are rivalries. Picton and Wellington I understand enough not to go there. Athol and South Marysburgh — I hear the opposition was deep and relentless, though less so now. Perfectly proving Dr. Freud’s point: the more similar people are the stronger the antagonism they harbour for one another.

There is no getting around the fact though that what matters here for the most part is important. Whether you have a house, for example. Or enough to eat. Or a job. Whether you are a decent person counts for a lot, because people count on you. For friendship, and for help. Whether you are true to yourself and to others, work hard, fulfill your potential, are generous and kind.

These things might matter more at least in part because the people who live here know one another. Whenever I mention one local to another, they know everything about them. Even if they haven’t seen them in years.

Those things matter here the way they ought to matter. I’m not sure I could make the same claim for the city.

In the city, place is a matter of real estate. A consumer fantasy — a pointless and delusional way of valuing things. In the country, the sense of place is fundamental. It is about history, and shared terrain, and co-existence.

I’ll take the country.