New Houses

I grew up in a three-story house in the suburbs of St. Paul. One street over, a neighbor had the same house as us, except it was mirrored. Visiting them was strange, because I knew the floor-plan by heart, but it was all reversed, and there was different furniture in all the same places. Our houses were built at the same time, by the same development company, and was one of many identical houses laid out along twisting roads like trails like by worms beneath the bark of a tree.

It’s easy to get turned around in our neighborhood. The streets double-back on each other and connect at odd angles. If a friend ever drove me home, the final directions were a rapid string of “right,” “next left,” “straight here,” “follow that curve,” “left,” “oh, you can take that road instead,” and so on, all in the span of a minute or two.

My hometown has existed since the mid-1800s, but it was mostly farmland until the 80s. Between 1980 and 2000, the population quadrupled as farmland was sold to developers. Now, its primary commodity is housing.

When our house was new, there was a cornfield behind us. A few years after we moved in, that cornfield was ripped up, and a new housing block was created. Each year since then, the boundary between neighborhoods and farmland continues to creep back. The margin between them is a moving valley of muddy construction equipment, mounds of dirt, and winding paths that mark the future roads.

Growing up in a suburb, Halloween was always fantastic. The houses were endless. We could stuff our buckets with candy as long as we weren’t too cold to walk to the next door. Christmas was even better; all of those houses lit up with colored lights and decorations. It was dazzling.

In the winter, the roads were crusted over with salt and sand. If a snow storm threatened our ability to go to school the next day, a fleet of snow plows was deployed overnight to ensure that not a day of school went unenforced. That was how I saw it back then, anyway.

Though winters were long, they eventually gave way to hot summers. Then, I was free to explore the winding roads and back-routes on my bike. I learned to get from one place to another via the bike trails before I figured out the roads. Some days, I would bike up to the public library, stop by a cafe, and lounge at a community pool on the way home. When I was biking one day, I found a pair of trees that looked like chicken from the right angle.

The city grew substantially during the sixteen years I spent there as a child, but I didn’t notice it as much as when I went to college. Coming back a couple times each year, I was shocked to see new shopping centers springing up between each return. New churches were built, and old churches’ attendance wilted. The Applebee’s we used to visit after each drama performance has mysteriously survived. I assume they eek out a living from teenagers buying half-price appetizers. Returning home is always a mixture of nostalgia and surprise.

A friend from college came to visit, once. He found my city unnerving in its sameness. I can understand that. There’s a dystopian quality to all of these identical houses stretching on as far as you can see, neatly portioned and curated. But there are fine details that crack the mold. Some of the chaos is manufactured, apportioned for, like the trail-latticed parks that have been dropped every few blocks. Most of it developed as the city did, and I’ve noticed more of it as I get older.

The architecture, still mostly the same, has gotten some diversity as new buildings go up. The library, for one, is a unique mix of indoor park, school, birthday party playground, and YMCA that could only have been built in the 90s. As some of the earlier neighborhoods grow older, as well, the trees get taller, and the roads become more worn. New houses replace old ones, and reduce the number of houses that are the same model.

Maybe the creepiest part of a suburb is the newness of it. When everything is new, it looks uniform, polished, and neat. When we look at all that shiny uniformity, we’re unsettled because it doesn’t match our experiences of day-to-day life. But character comes with age, and as my little town gets older, I look forward to seeing that character grow.