Burbs

July 6, 2020

Sitting in the back yard on the bench our son built for us, I don’t want to think about complicated things, although more and more, everything is complicated. But I’m done “decluttering” for the day. It’s quiet. The neighbors next door aren’t on their deck playing their unique music. Anchored here, thinking my old-guy thoughts, I can’t help going over in my head the bizarre, baffling, hilarious things I’ve seen around here in these 33 years.

Above my head a huge maple extends its limbs over the roof, probably damaging it. Our back yard is a hill steep enough for the kids to sleigh down when they were that age. The yard is enclosed in scrub and trees that hang thickly over our weed lawn, blocking most daylight. The property behind us at the top of the hill resembles a jungle. The occupants, probably renters, have not yet cut the yard this spring and seldom did last summer. It’s a thick tangle of bushes and vines, nearly obscuring the house. I don’t mind, the massive growth gives the impression that we live on a lush nature preserve. Sandy worries about snakes, though. I imagine the forest reclaiming the entire lot, then spreading down the hill.

The fence along the south side, put up by the owner years ago, is collapsing. He’s been gone for a half-dozen years, the house is rented. The current tenants aren’t motivated to do anything about the fence. Neither were the previous occupants. So it sags, sometimes a ten-foot section teeters over and falls into our yard. I’ve propped it up with a two-by-four.

The house on the north side has a basement apartment. The owner bought the place about eight months ago. He lives upstairs and rents the apartment to a couple with three little girls. They cook many of their meals outside on a propane gas grill on the side of the house facing us. The parents don’t speak English, but the two older girls are perfectly fluent. Sandy has given their mother a couple of our daughters’ old but still good coats and dolls. The girls always wave, smile, and yell “Hi!”

Like anyone who’s lived in the same place a long time, we’ve seen it change. Change is putting it mildly. People talk endlessly about the explosion of residential and business growth in northern Virginia over the past three decades. Trees go down, subdivisions go up: thousands of homes and townhomes. Then the Stop-N-Gos, the 7-11s, the Sheetzes and Wawas move in.  Live here if you need gas and coffee.

But that’s going on everywhere. I wrote last summer about how you’ll never be lonely if you drive along America’s numbered state highways. It’s here, where we live, that we observe the evolution of suburbia. A caveat: in neighborhoods ruled by HOAs, things don’t change, except for the trees and shrubs. Most people don’t want to be hassled so they generally obey the rules. They get the pools and tennis courts.

Our neighborhood was one of the first settled in the “community” of Lake Ridge, within the worn-out industrial-residential town of Woodbridge. Lake Ridge isn’t a municipal place, just a series of subdivisions along a four-lane thoroughfare. This neighborhood doesn’t have an HOA. So we don’t have those annoying fees. Folks are free to put their own stamp on their homes and the street out front. No HOA means Christmas lights year-round, religious statues and giant inflated Darth Vader balloons on the front lawn, slat fences labeled “beware of the dog,” and boats, including some enormous ones, parked in the street. These are boats that never go to sea.

We have pickup trucks and minivans parked closely together in the street to conceal that license plates are missing. We have cars and trucks parked nearly forever, abandoned. Late last year, on a pouring rainy night, we were amazed to see a tow truck pull up behind a car that had been parked for months, hook it up and haul it away.

Sandy frequently counts the cars parked in front of a house down the street where probably four families live. It doesn’t bother me. Sure, they’re probably illegal. None of my business. The family next door to us, or some of their many friends and relatives who visit frequently, without masks, likely are illegal. I hope the police have more important things to do.

The neighborhood probably is a lot like others. We have our petty crime, our odd door-to-door people (no “no soliciting” signs around here), our amateur fireworks any time of year, our loud dogs and missing cats. We have neighbors who moved in late at night and moved right out again. We have—there being no HOA—front lawns that can get to a foot high. We have our oldsters who keep their eye on you. We have our do-it-yourselfers who shouldn’t do it themselves.

We have, as aforementioned, a mix of nationalities, which means exotic cooking aromas, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Chinese, and others, and loud music from other continents—all the other continents. What we haven’t had is trouble. OK, one bad experience, a robbery, years ago. Otherwise this mix of bureaucrats, maintenance and construction people, restaurant staffers, domestic workers, enlisted military—families, single parents, and retired folks—gets along. We all wonder about each other, but we get along.

Isn’t that all that matters? The rough spots I see may be rough only to me. The yapping dog up the street may be truly his owner’s best friend. The flip side of self-awareness, after all, is cluelessness: my neighbors may not like the color of my house, or my attitude. Be positive, I remind myself, constantly.  Things may fall apart around us. Still, find good thoughts. Live with faith and hope.

In Nashville we lived in the city, near academics, professionals, students, and musicians, with city bus service, neighborhood shops, cafes, a theater. Then, of necessity, we landed here in the suburbs. Not the manicured-lawns kind. We found ourselves in the melting-pot burbs, the “beware of the dog,” big-boat burbs.

I hear a distant, low bark of thunder, and look up. The sky is darker. I stay in my chair, thinking about how we got here: what if this happened, if that didn’t. We’ll move away eventually. We wonder who will move in. My joke is we’ll come back in 10 years. Our house will be gone. Instead, we’ll find a forest.