May 11, 2026

On a clear morning last week, with the sky deep blue, we walked up our street and looped back around the block.  We critiqued the neighbors’ landscaping, the shrubbery and flowers. Some homes have lawns like emerald carpets, a few are overrun with dandelions. Most structures are in good shape, a few could use a coat of paint. One place looked empty, shutters hanging loose, mold creeping along the eves.

It’s suburbia, America’s promised land. It’s where most Americans, especially those with kids, want to live. If they don’t, they probably thought at some point they would.

In 1964 John Cheever, the bard of the burbs, published “The Swimmer” in The New Yorker, set in Cheever’s usual world, the extremely wealthy environs of Fairfield County, Connecticut. The movie was made in 1968, starring Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, a well-off, well-connected executive who lives there. It was filmed in Westport.

Merrill appears in his swim trunks at a friend’s pool. He chats, then decides to head home by swimming backyard pools along the way. As he treks from yard to yard and pool to pool he first encounters neighbors who greet him warmly. He then meets others who are hostile and cold, reawakening memories of his own bad behavior and personal failings. He finds himself limping, trying to cross a busy highway. He grows depressed and despondent and arrives at his home to find it dark and abandoned.

Probably everyone has seen “The Burbs,” the 1989 semi-comedy that pokes fun at the eccentric, potentially malevolent beliefs and presumptions of suburbanites about their neighbors. The film has its dark moments, implying that subdivision life isn’t all friendly block parties and cookouts.  

As a kid I walked a lot. Not far from our neighborhood I would pass a few streets of large, expensive homes. One house, though, stood well off the street, in the shade of tall oaks and maples. The walls were shabby and weatherbeaten, the paint chipped, windows broken. The porch had collapsed, the front steps broken. Weeds grew a foot high in the yard.

Clearly the place was abandoned. It didn’t exactly ruin the impression of prosperity the owners of the surrounding homes had worked to create. It did suggest a darker, more complex, picture of the neighborhood. One house can do that.

We left Virginia for a few reasons, one, to get closer to family, then others: the booming growth of the D.C. metropolitan area, which felt like a decline in quality of life; near-continuous traffic gridlock, commercial sprawl, higher costs, ethnic tensions. New roads were being pushed through subdivisions.

Some closer-in suburbs governed by HOAs still present as pristine enclaves, close replicas of Fairfield County, Connecticut. Cheever’s Ned Merrill would feel at home in parts of Virginia’s Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudon counties, and Montgomery in Maryland. But many bedroom communities show stress.

When we arrived in Prince William, just south of Fairfax, in 1987, the subdivision was pretty and peaceful. In the mid-1990s Sandy was robbed at gunpoint at home by a teenager who lived a few doors away. One summer 87 homes in the area were vandalized.

In outlying suburbs, houses have been converted to rentals. Many show wear and tear, sloppy do-it-yourself repairs, garish paint jobs. Some lawns became weed farms, hedges left untrimmed. We noticed more pickup trucks parked overnight. Out-of-code backyard sheds appeared.

One vigilant neighbor, an elderly lady, would call police. They were overwhelmed. In those final few months I never saw a squad car on our street.

That was the physical evolution, once-attractive places, under pressure from age, living costs, growth, and sprawl, becoming worn and threadbare. But appearances may lie. Good people remain as the paint peels and weeds sprout. In the world created by Cheever where Ned lives, giant homes, manicured lawns, pools, and polished manners may conceal hypocrisy, infidelity, alcoholism, shady finances. Cheever, himself a brilliant drunk, knew that world well.

The single-family home remains a talisman of success in America. Interest rates have ticked up, but developers are still razing forests to build houses for the rich and not-so-rich. The financial meltdown of ’08 taught many lessons, one is that people desperately want houses and mortgages. All sorts of people make it into suburban paradises.

Around here we have a mix, young and middle-aged working parents with kids, single parents, retired oldsters, immigrants, veterans with spouses, a few single people living alone. Folks work in local businesses, or for BMW, GE, Michelin. No investment bankers or high-powered attorneys, as far as I know. I don’t see any Porsches or Mercedes. Lots of big pickups. There’s a small neighborhood pool, which is okay, but the restrooms need painting.

Just outside the subdivision is a Dollar General, always busy. A railroad track runs behind the neighborhood, we hear the trains every night. Barely two miles away is a giant Mitsubishi Chemical plant. (We didn’t know that when we moved in.) One-level industrial buildings line U.S. 14, an eight-lane highway. Fast food joints are packed in on Wade Hampton Blvd., two miles from our place.

Theoretically we are a different universe from the Connecticut suburbs that send sons and daughters to Ivy League schools. I think kids here go to Greenville Tech. So the contrasts seem obvious. But really, are they? Cheever’s world in “The Swimmer” inevitably was a caricature. Not all rich people are martini-swilling hypocrites. And most likely some of the easy-going locals here who never miss Bible study on Sundays and Wednesdays are less than meets the eye. We’re just a few short decades away from Jim Crow.

I sometimes hear friends say they’d like to live in New York City, to experience the electric urban atmosphere, the shows, the great restaurants. Others hope to buy land in the country, to farm, raise chickens and horses, enjoy peace and quiet. Most likely all of them will stay in the burbs, and love it.

May 4, 2026

The class started at 5:30 AM. Jennifer, the instructor, called directions. We teetered into a variation of the “plank” position, one arm stretched skyward. She walked over and adjusted my stance, pushing my arm forward. I struggled for breath. She moved on to check on someone else. I relaxed and dropped my tired arms.

We went on for an hour at the YMCA sunrise yoga class. Soft music played, candles glowed in the dimly lit room. Jennifer whispered commands, warrior pose, child pose, downward dog. The veterans moved smoothly through the routine. A few others, like me, cheated here and there. Soon we all lay prone, arms stretched behind us, eyes closed.  When the class ended Jen murmured an incantation.

The students rolled up their mats, chatted a bit, then drifted away. It was still dark outside. A couple of friends talked about their plans for the day. One young woman shouldered her mat and gym bag and said, “I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes. You know, basically, take the good with the bad, do your best every day.”

She was paraphrasing, but I got her meaning. The first few lines include, “What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.”

She smiled. “Well anyway, it helps,” she said. “I have to get the kids going.” She walked through the front door.

Ecclesiastes strikes a chord with the Sixties-vintage set, who played and replayed the Byrds’ 1965 ballad, Turn, Turn, Turn, which is eight verses of the third chapter: “To everything there is a season … and a time to every purpose under heaven, a time to be born, a time to die,” and so on.

It rang resoundingly through the decade of revolution, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the courage of the freedom marchers, the terrorist bomb attacks of the Weather Underground.

The yoga routine is a jump-start for coping for young parents: children, work, bills, relationships. The relaxed muscles help. The grayheads in the class, exactly two of us, also are borrowing lines from Ecclesiastes, we’re the generation passing. We are keeping doctors’ appointments, going for tests, finalizing wills. It’s a holding action, postponing the inevitable.

Sandy and I made plans, mostly negative plans. We dropped the annual 900-mile round trip to Virginia for the mid-May Massanutten Mountain race. Gas is over $4.00/gallon and could be more if the war is still going on. A few other old-timers still show up in Fort Valley to mark the trails, handle parking, work at aid stations. But only a few. Our generation is passing.

The St. Anselm College reunion in New Hampshire also is out. Ecclesiastes is haunting it. Reunions, after all, are acts of defying time. The class of ’71 lately has been less good at defying it. Like every other class.

We know of shining exceptions. Nearly a month ago, on April 11, the Navy commissioned its newest destroyer, USS Harvey C. Barnum Jr. (DDG-124) in Norfolk, Virginia. The ship’s name honors Col. Barnum USMC (Ret.), a St. Anselm alum, class of ’62, who as a one-year first lieutenant won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam in 1965 after a horrific firefight at an obscure place called Ky Phu.  

Barnum spoke at the ceremony: “Our strength is not built on technology alone,” he said, referring to the ship’s loadout of radars, guns, and missiles, “but on trust, trust that we will stand by one another and that no one will ever be left behind.” He then issued his own command to the ship’s crew: “Charge On!” The colonel, 86 in July, doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

Then there’s the rest of us. We’re scheduled to show up in June, for the third straight year, at Sandy’s family’s get-together in Mount Juliet, Tenn., a half-hour east of Nashville. The Harper family, originally from Franklin County, is nestled mostly in the middle of the state, with a few people sprinkled around Georgia and (I think) Florida. It will be a far different affair than the Barnum commissioning.

Two years ago the event attracted a good-sized crowd of uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces. Last year it was smaller. A thunderstorm swept in, so did mortality. We looked around and missed people. Sandy’s sister Kay and brother-in-law Dale had passed, both a decade younger than “Barney” Barnum. Last summer her second brother-in-law, Alex, died. Other familiar faces won’t be there.

We’ll drive into Nashville and visit the Veterans Cemetery where her parents and brother lie. Later we’ll stop by our old house near Vanderbilt University. In June it will be 40 years since we said goodbye to the place. Last summer, year 39, we talked to a neighbor, a young woman who hadn’t been born until decades after we drove away with our three kids, two of them then under five. The fourth, Kathleen, showed up in Jersey.

We’ll stroll up the street and stop at the Kroger supermarket, which used to be a Harris Teeter, which used to be a Compton’s Food Town, in the dark ages of the early 1980s. Across the street is Brown’s Diner, now a lunchtime hot spot instead of the cramped tavern of long ago.

But the past also is exhausting. Memories can be good lessons or hard ones. Forty years raises ghosts, sometimes regrets. Some things could have turned out another way. Still, the words remain, the eternal wisdom: one generation is passing, another comes. We’ll hang around for a while, then turn to the six-hour trip home. Traffic will be heavy on I-40 East. The plan, as always: move forward, or: “Charge On!”

April 27, 2026

The Vietnamese parish church is off a busy local road near our place, along a sharp curve. There’s a sign, “Our Lady of La Vang,” but it’s easy to miss. The church is set well back from the road. At a quick glance it’s another one-story industrial building near a dozen others.

The parish issues no bulletins or announcements. There’s a blank Facebook page and a link (lavangsc.org) stating “this domain isn’t connected to a website.”  The diocesan website provides the address, phone number, and a schedule of services. The 10 AM Sunday Mass is listed as Vietnamese/English.

Maybe it was our January visit to Vietnam that prompted me to go. In Saigon the Catholic cathedral, Notre Dame, was closed for renovations, the outside walls bracketed with scaffolding. Someone said the work had been going on for years. Not a high priority for the Communist government, I guessed.

The trip brought to mind the Vietnamese diaspora: of the more than four million who left their native country during and after the Vietnam war, nearly three million came to the U.S. Some of them, and their children and grandchildren, attend this church. It is a place of salvation.

So we showed up at Our Lady of La Vang at 10 on Sunday. Surprise: no English was spoken.

A cantor led prayers in musical Vietnamese, a tonal language of one-syllable words, many with several meanings. Intent is conveyed by inflection. The congregation responded in a lilting, practiced voice. We listened. These were people of faith.

We don’t know Vietnamese, but we could follow the progression of the liturgy, the scripture readings, prayers, the consecration. The priest delivered a sermon. His manner was direct and passionate. We stood with everyone else and listened to the lyrical closing prayer. As we left the priest smiled, shook my hand, and in perfect English thanked us for coming.

The church interior is beautiful, decorated with the statues of Western saints. Why would a Vietnamese Catholic church find itself in the Deep South world of Baptists and Pentecostals?

Greenville is a hotbed of organized religion. More than 100 non-denominational “fellowship” churches are scattered through the city. Like anywhere else we have the mainline Protestants, the Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, some Episcopalians. About 10 percent of the state’s population are Catholic. Greater Greenville, with about a million people, has ten Catholic churches, including La Vang and Saint Rafka’s, a Maronite (Syrian) church.

There are “ethnic” church services everywhere. Nearly every mid-size and large church of any denomination has at least one Spanish service. Our regular church, the largest in the state, offers two Masses in Spanish and two in Portuguese. I read that the Charleston diocese serves 1,500 Vietnamese at four Vietnamese churches in the state.

I went back to La Vang on a weekday. This time the priest spoke English. In his Gospel message he talked about living in faith under Communism in the homeland. The congregation, mostly refugees or children of refugees, listened and nodded.

I looked up the history. Most of the Vietnamese who emigrated to the U.S. after the war are in California, second-most in Texas. South Carolina seems like an odd landing point, but around 4,000 Vietnamese are in the state. Probably a few hundred live here.

The name Lady of La Vang is based on a legend, created around 1800 by Vietnamese Catholics escaping persecution, of a vision of a woman holding a child in a jungle called La Vang. Word spread of a miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary. The Catholic Church doesn’t endorse the story, but it acknowledges the devotion of believers. A basilica was built in Vietnam’s Quang Tri Province.

I read there are 23 “Our Lady of La Vang” parishes in the United States. Like our little La Vang, they all are shrines to those people who came safely, and to the three million who died in the war.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a University of Southern California scholar (On the Road, Jan. 5), who came to the U.S. as a refugee at age four with his parents, writes that “although my family and other refugees brought our war stories with us to America, they remain largely unheard and unread, except by people like us.”

He continues: “My father would never see his mother again, and not see his father for 40 years. My mother would never see her parents again, and not see her sisters for 20 years.”

The Vietnam war is a strange throwback at this moment. We are trying to digest the indigestible: Trump attacking the Pope because Leo and three U.S. cardinals, with ten advanced degrees in philosophy and theology among them, told him his Iran adventure doesn’t meet even the lowest standard for a “just war.” It has, already, killed a couple of thousand civilians.

Others have explained that the baseline for a just war is that only the certainty that a country is in imminent danger of being attacked by another permits a preemptive attack by the country being threatened. The belief that another country simply might attack does not permit starting a war (otherwise, Iran would be justified in attacking the U.S. and Israel). Philosopher Edward Feser has written that “the case for a just war must be morally certain. Otherwise it is morally wrong to initiate the conflict.”

Feser continues: “… the war’s violation of just war conditions is manifest. That conviction has only been strengthened … as the Trump administration has made evident that it had no feasible plan to avoid plunging the world into entirely foreseeable economic chaos, has deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, and even threatened that ‘a whole civilization will die’ if demands are not met.”

So we dial back, yet again, to Vietnam, a 20-year nightmare of a rehearsal for Trump’s war. Those faithful souls and their priest at Lady of La Vang remember. They keep coming to church, to bow in prayer.

April 20, 2026

Three men stepped onto the Foothills Trail, which runs across the northern tier of South Carolina, to trek the last 20 miles to the western terminus at Oconee State Park. From a point near the state fish hatchery, they moved easily west to the Chattooga River. The trail follows the river for a while, then turns south to the park.

The northwestern Georgia-South Carolina border region is rugged wilderness. Through it the Chattooga flows, the boundary between the two states. Giant boulders lodged in the riverbed create explosive stretches of white water. The river domain is a designated national scenic area. Only hikers, canoeists, and rafters pass through.

Thick forests extend away from the river for miles on both sides, the foliage now is full and brilliant. Near the riverbank, at the end of a winding, steep gravel road the hatchery breeds fingerling trout for stocking the state’s rivers and lakes. Five years ago Sandy and I stopped there the day before our anniversary and looked at the long troughs filled with racing fish. We drove on to Lake Hartwell.

The Foothills winds across gentle and rolling terrain for four miles, then turns rough and rooty as it nears the river. The thunder of the Chattooga rapids breaks the forest silence. Remote is the word for this near-empty corner of this small state better known for beaches. It is a place to come to.

This stretch of wild country isn’t unique in its lyrical presentation. It recalls others, near-unknown, near-accidents of nature that lift the outsider to something like joy. I thought of the Sequatchie Valley in Tennessee, south of Crossville, and the deep woods and craggy hills around Errol at the northern tip of New Hampshire. They are patches of quiet that almost no outsider passes through.

Things rush back. The poetry of one magical place echoes in others.

Halfway between Nashville and Knoxville, the valley descends sharply from the Cumberland Plateau. On the eastern side, the plateau faces a long northeast-southeast cliff called Walden Ridge. From Pikeville, midway through the valley, U.S. 30 runs east to Dayton, site of the 1925 Monkey Trial.

Over maybe 20 years we drove many times through the valley to visit Sandy’s aunt and uncle, who farmed 130 acres five miles outside Pikeville. She had spent stretches of summer there for years, helping her aunt in the garden, snapping beans, gathering eggs, and so forth. When working the farm became too hard the couple sold it and moved to town. We kept visiting until they passed.

We went back to Pikeville a couple of years ago and rented a house for a few days to visit Fall Creek Falls State Park, ten miles up on the Plateau. We parked, I hiked down the twisting, rocky path to the falls, where Fall Creek cascades 250 feet from a steep cliff.

Our Pikeville rental was near Sandy’s aunt’s and uncle’s former home. We walked up the street, a neighbor called out to her. They visited for a while.

It’s been 18 months since we went up to Errol. The idea was to see the Great Northern Woods, which begins beyond the old factory town of Berlin on N.H.16. The narrow road is bounded by the Androscoggin River, which undulates south from Umbagog Lake, then turns east into Maine. North of Berlin we passed a sign for the 13-mile woods, gorgeous dark-pine country along the fast-moving river.  We saw a dozen “Watch for Moose” signs.

Errol, population about 300, is a spot on the road between Colebrook, 20 miles west on the Vermont line, and Umbagog Lake, about two miles from Maine. Colebrook, with a couple of restaurants and an IGA grocery, is a busy little place.

On Sunday we got to Mass at the mission chapel. We saw what we could in a couple of days. Between Errol and Colebrook is the spectacular Dixville Notch, a cut in the mountains also known as the first place votes are cast in presidential elections, usually something like 16 to 14 favoring Republicans. We hiked woodland trails amidst the brilliant fall foliage.

The next day we drove three hours back to Manchester for a flight home to clean up our Hurricane Helene damage.

The Foothills men started just after dawn, moving easily as the trail rose then descended. The woods grew thicker, tangled with Helene’s blowdowns. They followed a rocky spur to the Kings Crossing waterfall to take photos, then pushed on across the roughening country. The dull thunder of the rapids grew.

The trail meandered along the rushing picture-perfect river for a while, then rose in steep switchbacks. The men looked down at glistening white water sluicing through the ridges that tower hundreds of feet on the Carolina and Georgia sides. The weaving trail led them away from the river. The forest went silent.

They climbed then descended beyond the 11-mile point and picked up their pace along soft, level trail, then stopped to recharge at 13 miles, sprawling on the pine needles. They headed east then south across a rural highway. The trail softened for a humid slog, then led them the final four miles to the 20-mile finish. They breathed deeply, felt the peace of their surroundings, then packed and headed for home.

These are special places, maybe for odd reasons. We all keep a storehouse of places like these, not unique, not National Parks or famous birthplaces. It may be the isolation of quiet communities or the vastness of wild, remote spaces, that convey the consolation of loneliness or companionship for a brief flight from the world’s dreck. Some landmark, some striking impression, locks them in mystery and memory. They draw us from our world for a while, offering some understanding of peace, of redemption.

April 13, 2026

I walked out the front door and saw the tree. I thought I saw the future.

It’s not exactly a tree, really just a three-foot-long stalk anchored in a 12-inch plastic planter. It sat where I had left it near the garage nearly five months ago, in late November. Through the bleak winter I walked past it without seeing it. Now a dozen green leaves fluttered along its full length. It was alive.

A week before Thanksgiving I registered for the “Turkey Trot” run around downtown streets. The race was sponsored by a non-profit, TreesUpstate, that encourages tree planting and cultivation and green-space development. It donated free trees to the runners. I took one and tossed it in the van.

Trees, along with front lawns, are part of the suburban mystique. Families who venture from crowded cities seeking space, safety, and good schools in commuter subdivisions hope also for the traditional tree-lined street. They hope for gentle shade in spring and summer, for the cheerful, vibrant colors of fall.

Climate dictates. In the desert Southwest local drought-resistant species, cacti and other things, may be all homeowners expect. But in most of the country the suburban vision is shade-abundant oaks, maples, sycamores, and others, creating a sense of lush, verdant comfort and beauty.

Trees weren’t always important. The history of America’s migration to the suburbs dates from the end of World War II and the wildfire spread of so-called Levittowns, started by New York builder Levitt & Sons. Their homes were built to cookie-cutter designs, Cape Cods or modest ranches, stamped out inside of a week.

In those years builders bulldozed forests and fields to make room for construction. Many if not most of the Levittown-type neighborhoods went up in sterile treeless spaces. The developers sold mostly to young couples, who used the husband’s veterans benefits to afford the home.  

My parents were among them. When I was three or four they made the life-changing decision to move to Ridgewood, N.J., from a small New York City apartment. The neighborhood I grew up in fit the pattern, boxy Cape Cods, postage-stamp yards. The selling price was around $10,000. This was 1953.

The subdivision was, and I think still is, called “Ridgewood Lawns.” I recall, my memory helped along by old photos, the front yards were dirt. It was up to the new owner to plant grass. The developer put in thin maple saplings along the sidewalk. Seven decades later those saplings are fully grown monsters, providing the classic tree-shaded look for the enjoyment of the current residents, who likely were not born in 1953.  

Our Nashville and Virginia yards had big trees. While we lived in those places we thought of the landscaping as the abiding, unchanging background to our personal space. But over the years we recognized that time has no anchor. Before we were born those trees didn’t exist. Now the giant trees that shaded the front lawn and backyard of our Nashville house are long gone. Trees grow, they die, people cut them down.

Our lot here is bordered on one side by a large hedgerow, but no trees shade our small square front yard. The across-the-street neighbor has a small tree. Up and down the block you see one or two, a yard a few doors away has several. The look is largely bare. In the summer the sun beats down, I wait until evening to cut the grass.

Occasionally we would talk about having a nice shade tree in the yard. It was one of those ideas that would pop up then be crowded out by something else. Now I looked at my three-foot-high stalk. The new leaves were a bright, healthy green. We could do this.

We called the local utility service that will mark underground utility lines. In Virginia years ago I had tried to excavate for something and cut the buried Verizon line with my shovel. We did without the service until the company sent a guy to repair it a week later. A charge was added to our bill.

Within days, technicians from AT&T, Spectrum, and Duke Power showed up and spraypainted red, orange, and yellow streaks across the lawn to mark their lines, some curving from front to back. The discovery was unnerving, a lot of power runs under our patch. Still, it seemed there would be room for the tree.

Then it rained, one day, two, three. The painted lines washed away. I peered at the lawn, trying to reconstruct them from memory. I called again. Again the techs showed up and painted the lawn. I found a spot I thought was safely away from the lines and dug nervously into the concrete-like Carolina clay.

My back ached as I shoveled. Six inches, eight inches, ten inches. I breathed deeply. A white pickup marked Greer CPW pulled up at the curb. A fellow in a hardhat and yellow vest got out. I leaned on my shovel. The back of his shirt had a label: “Detection Validation.”

“Hi, I’m with Public Works,” he said. “I’m here to check the line marking. We want to be sure it’s been done right.” He fetched his detection device and spray gun from the truck and stared at the ground. He followed the painted lines up and down the yard, his device beeping. He walked close to my hole.

“Whoa, this guy’s a little off,” he said. He was three feet away from my digging. He painted a new line. “This is fiber optic,” he said. He looked at the hole. “You’re okay,” he said. “Glad you called us. Have a good day!” He stowed his gear and drove off. I stuck the tree in the hole, filled it in, watered, and added some mulch. I wondered about the roots reaching the fiber optic.

The next day, anyway, the leaves were still green. We imagine it towering, full, and luxuriant. That will not be for us. It may not survive. But maybe it will. Ten or twenty years from now a future owner, perhaps a young family, will enjoy it.