Sail Away Home: Suburbia

This summer we moved back to the house we left five years earlier. It's a cute little house, two-story, with hundreds of identical twins scattered about the neighborhood. It's nestled in the foothills, nice mountain views, windy as hell, abundance of snakes, bears and other unsavory critters, including the kids next door. We have a Safeway, a teeny library without a single Stephen King or Barbara Kingsolver book (although if you want nine copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar you'll be all set), a couple of gas stations, a chinese joint, Subway, an art gallery (wtf? We don't even have a coffee shop), and, saving the best for last, a liquor store. At least there's that.

The 'hood

The nearest Target/Costco/Lowes/things-otherwise-essential-to-life are all about twenty minutes away on a good day. Which means being in the middle of a home improvement project and running out of fifty-cents worth of screws and having to make a forty minute round-trip to Lowes because you know what? You can't buy screws at a fucking art gallery.

When the kiddo was a wee baby he hated the car. Actually, I'm not sure hate is a strong enough word to describe what he felt while riding in the car. We tried different car seats, we tried toys, we tried mirrors. One day, thirty minutes into a Target round trip, I got so flustered and stressed by the banshee screaming coming from the backseat that I cranked the stereo to drown him out. I was listening to an album by the Old 97's, and playing at that moment was a song called Old Familiar Steam. Once I quit hyperventilating, I realized something magical had happened. There was silence from the back seat. Worried I'd scared him to death, I turned off the music. He started screaming. I turned it back up, this time at a more respectable volume so as not to destroy his baby hearing. He calmed down. Okie dokie. Old Familiar Steam on repeat every single car ride it is then. No probs. And really, it wasn't a problem for the first couple of months. But he didn't get over his car anxiety until he was fifteen months old. That's fifteen months of Old Familiar Steam on repeat every single minute in the car. If we tried to talk while it was playing, he cried. Sometimes I'd drop him off at my mom's to run an errand by myself and I'd be cruising around for miles before I realized I was free to change the song. It was permanently stuck in my head until sometime around the time he turned four.

Old 97's saved my life with that song. Music is magic.

The baby was about three months old by the time his first Christmas rolled around. Jon was flying a trip the week before Christmas and I was doing the single-parent thing and trying to act like I was good at it, which, I assure you, I was not. It started snowing. Fat flakes, a thick blanket in the backyard to cover all the dog shit I could never manage to clean up. It was pretty the first day. But it didn't stop. It didn't stop until there were five-foot drifts against the side of the house. It didn't stop until entire cars were nothing but snowy lumps, the antennas sticking up in a surrender. It didn't stop until the airport closed. It snowed a little more for good measure, enough to keep the airport closed for days. I was trapped. No way in, no way out. The plows couldn't keep up. My mom couldn't come rescue me. It would be days before Jon would be able to get home. My baby wouldn't sleep, wouldn't let me put him down, wouldn't let me take a break from bouncing him on a yoga ball. The dogs were whiny. I'd never felt so isolated.

And that's the thing about the far-off suburbs. It's a crazy isolation and for what point? It's living in the sticks and being surrounded by people. If I'm going to live in the sticks where every convenience is five repeats of Old Familiar Steam away, then I want to live on land. I want acreage, no asshole neighbors in sight. Our neighborhood is noisy in a way a neighborhood with houses stacked atop each other are. There are leaf blowers and lawn mowers and barking dogs and dirt bikes and annoying kids. It is never quiet even though we live in the middle of nowhere. If there is going to be noise and people then I want a city at my fingertips. I want places to walk to, convenient public transit, a hustle and bustle the suburbs can't offer.

Boston was deliciously noisy. Noisy in the way of purpose, a constant hum punctuated by sirens and honks. Yeah, it was totally obnoxious at times, but it was always expected. It's a major city. It would be eery if it fell silent.

Suburbia, the kind of suburbia our neighborhood is, is a place to eat and sleep. It's lawns to mow and square footage to clean. It's decent schools with all day hours. It's two labrador retrievers per house minimum, left outside to bark all day. It's Safeway and not enough checkouts open ever and cashiers who want to know your life story.

We've been back a few months now. The kiddo has made friends. I've made an enemy. There still isn't a hardware store. It's an adjustment, a major change. I'm not sure how long we'll last. We've been talking about maybe moving to the country, if there will be such a thing left in Colorado after the developers get though with it. A place with some land. A place to sit outside at night and look at the stars without hearing the neighbors laugh at their latest fart. This suburbia thing is for the nine-to-fivers, the Monday through Friday workforce that propels our country along. It's not for an airline pilot and the wife who's been milking the stay-at-home-mom thing for way longer than is socially acceptable. It's not for a kid who has no idea what sitting in a school desk from 9-4 is like. We need something more. A tiny sailboat was our something more until we grew too big for it. I'm thinking our something more next time around will include a barn. A big-ass barn but not for animals. Instead, a tiny little airplane. Maybe we'll have a dirt strip out back and teach the kiddo how to fly before he learns to drive. Maybe we'll have a trailer camper and use the mountains as our classroom. Maybe the house will be old and creaky and falling apart and give these hands something to do. A place where we can pour our souls. Living far out will be worth it for the freedom, a freedom suburbia will never be able to provide.

Meanwhile, there's a story in the suburbs. When all else fails, there is always a story.