Growing Up in the Suburbs

This post is in response to the third Ecotone Wiki joint blogging topic, Suburbs. Other posts on this topic can be found here.

When I started to think about suburbs for this piece, the stereotypical “kids and cul-de-sacs” image surfaced. I pictured green lawns, children being ferried to soccer and ballet and camp and swimming and all the other activities that people-mostly mothers-at work recite incessantly, half with pride, half with resignation. I pictured single-family homes with two vehicles, neither of which fit inside a garage filled to bursting with the detritus of contemporary consumerism. I pictured something alien: not somewhere I’d fit in, feel comfortable.

I hang my laundry on a line outside our front door (front, not back)—this would probably be enough to get me arrested if I lived in Mace Ranch, not four miles from here. I have no interest in mowing lawns, in washing my ancient car on a regular basis (the summer dust in Davis ensures that this is an essential activity for anyone caring to have a shiny car, to look “respectable”), or in worrying about whether or not I’m conforming to the expectations of the neighborhood. It feels oppressive and confining to me.

Yet I grew up in suburbs. We moved to Spain when I was four from Tiburon, a suburb of San Francisco. Rereading my grandmother’s diary of that trip-across the ocean on the Nieu Amsterdam from New York to Southampton, the drive south through France where I apparently got appendicitis, the arrival in downtown Madrid on a hot, sweltering day in early August-I see the anxiety that must have plagued my parents (and grandparents, who were on childcare detail) to find somewhere suitable to live. Suitable: meaning suitable for children, American children, not the immaculately dressed Spanish children in the playground outside our downtown hotel where the ground was dirt, not grass. Not one of those four adults thought we could possibly adapt to living in an apartment, which is how most Spanish people lived. We weren’t immaculately dressed. We had different needs, it seems.

There was one place they found that conformed to their expectations of suitability: Mirasierra, a small area to the north of the city (in 1964 Madrid still had sheep regularly crossing the Paseo de la Castellana, sheep having the right of way over cars, to go and graze in the field in front of the Real Madrid soccer stadium). They scoured Mirasierra for a house to rent. We moved into a red-shuttered, granite-and-stucco three-bedroom with a “maid’s room” downstairs (where my brother, the youngest, slept, to the absolute horror of Francisca, who wore widow’s black and cleaned up after us).

There were shops at the top of the hill on Calle Nuria, which we were allowed to walk to by ourselves from about when I was seven, as long as we stayed on this side of the street. We walked barefoot (no Spanish child would EVER be allowed to do this) to buy our polos de naranja (orange popsicles) and black-market American comics on the diamond-patterned cement sidewalk and splashed in paddling pools and walked across the street to see if Annie or Robbie could play (the neighborhood was filled with foreigners, most of them executives from English, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, or Italian companies—and their children, many of whom by the time they were six could speak three or more languages). We had puppies and a rabbit and a chicken (neither of which survived very long and ended up in Francisca’s pot: we couldn’t eat them, of course, being unadaptable foreign children). We caught mumps and chicken pox and minnows in the mucky stream further west beyond the grapevines.

Our third Mirasierra house had a pool and we bought it. Franco’s Spain was unairconditioned apart from movie theatres, and stiflingly hot nights were mitigated by frequent dips in the pool which my poor father labored to keep free of leaves, lizards, wasps, ants, coins, bobby pins, and hair, hair, hair. We became the envy of friends-many of whom lived in apartments closer to their father’s office or to Runnymede, the English/International school we all went to-on account of the pool, and summers were filled with friends of various ages who came over, towels and bathing suits in hand. My mother ferried us to ballet and riding and orchestra practice, just like the Mace Ranch mothers do today.

I loved growing up in that place. The memories serve to soften my reaction to the aspirations of families with young children to live in a safe, green-filled environment, however Stepfordian I might find it. But I don’t have children and I don’t ever want to mow a lawn, and I like the smell of air-dried sheets too much to give that up. So we live nestled in among the landlord’s son’s beekeeping equipment in the back, with the walnut tree and the peach tree and the nectarines and plums, with a good view of the fields and the railroad track and the hills off to the west. The cropdusters are at it again. The field workers will be out early in the morning because it’s going to be in the 100’s again tomorrow, so I need to be somewhat appropriately dressed as I dump the compost onto the field before seven. This is not Mace Ranch.