"What color is your house?" I asked my friend. "Beige." She said this as if every house within 10 miles is not some shade of beige, as if I hadn't asked the question in order to identify her house. We took her 2-year-old for a walk throught the smooth suburban streets in his new red wagon (these days they come complete with seats and seatbelts). "I sometimes get lost," she explained as she tossed bread crumbs over her shoulder.
We sat on their deck and ate dinner, hoping to spy on the neighbors, which isn't too difficult sinced the trees in the vicinity are no higher than the fences. Unfortunately, they had all abandoned suburbia for their cabins. 2.5 kids, a mini-van, a beige house and a cabin on the lake - life in MN suburbs. We did have a view of 5 swing-sets, 4 trampolines and green grass as far as the eye could see, despite our recent drought. Jen lamented over the little garden patch she'd inherited when they bought the house a few months ago, now a breeding ground for weeds. I thought it was the only spot of ingenuity in the neighborhood.
While giving her son a bath, she and I engaged in conversation while she scrubbed her son's hair without watching. Suddenly he turned around looked up through a face full of bubbles. "Mommy?" asked his little red mouth, which was all we could see. He was scared, but we couldn't help laughing, which only made his little lip tremble and his eyes, once she uncovered them, shamed us with their mixture of disbelief and annoyance. "Mommy?" we kept repeating, imitatiting his little panicky voice. "Mommy?" We collapsed into laughter, bringing her husband in from the kitchen where he was doing dishes. He rescued his son from further humiliation and sent us out of the house.
As we sat at the wooden picnic table outside the Dairy Queen, I realized this hadn't always been a suburb. We'd passed the remnants of a small town on our way to devour soft serve and the DQ was parked on a dirt road next to a picturesque red barn and old white farm house. Sitting there with Jen, my "let's play hookey from work" friend, eating DQ and breathing in the aromatic mixture of hay, ragweed and manure that reminds me of my childhood, I thought, I could do this. I could live in the suburbs.
"I'm working at JCrew in the Outlet Mall," she said in between licks of her cone. "Yesterday I walked around for half of my shift with a pair of socks hanging from a thread on my back pocket. That was pretty funny. Actually, it was the most exciting thing that happened all day."
Hmmm. Maybe not.
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