Suburban Malaise

Garden • Philadelphia Main Line

This Anemic Winter

I went through a creative dry spell where I wasn't interested in taking pictures anymore; as a creative person one can't help thinking, why bother? But it's been so unseasonably mild here lately (now however, that may be changing), I went out on the local nature path and took some pictures. All the pictures look so serene—as if I'm in Vermont, but no, it's just New Jersey . . .  if  I'd moved the camera a  few feet the other way, the housing developments would show.

Autumn, Thank God

The remains of Hurricane Ivan cooled things off nicely here, and we escaped most of the heavy rains and flooding. The hurricane made the sky more dramatic than usual. One of my gripes about living in this part of the country is that much as I like the temperate weather, it leads to boring skies. I grew up around the Great Lakes and I'm used to looking up and seeing more cloud action. But I should stop looking out the window and think about getting organized. Now it's time to pull all the fall clothes out of the closet, even though there will still be plenty of warm days until October. They always seem more worn than they did when I put them away. And they bring up old emotions. But the cost of replacing them is enough to make me come to terms with their shabbiness. As we grow older, how much new stuff do we really need?

Lost and Found

I needed a box to send out a piece of pottery I'd sold on eBay. I dragged up a box from the basement and discovered it was filled with long, lost baby pictures of my daughter. I got nostalgic looking at the photos from her baby days, but I'm also glad that period of our lives is over. And this experience brought home to me what a mess our basement is—we still have boxes that we haven't unpacked from when we moved into this house twelve years ago.

Post-Holiday Exhaustion

After an excessivly social fourth of July weekend, we spent the day inside reading to recover our internal equilibrium. Fortunately it rained, so there was no obligation to go outside. My husband plowed through Bill Clinton's autobiography. I read an Artemis Fowl book about an Irish teenage mastermind. Not my usual reading, but I had bought the series for my daughter and she refused to read it. Instead, she preferred to read about a novel about a girl whose journal became a Hollywood film. I hated to see the Fowl books go to waste, so I read them. In fact, they're quite well-written.

Suburban Surrrealism

I spent a frustrating morning trying to install the Adobe Creative Suite upgrade. It's done, finally. Since, I mostly use Photoshop, I'll have to re-teach myself Illustrator and learn InDesign from scratch. It will be productive way to spend the summer, since I'm not really going anywhere or doing much of anything, except teaching as a degraded adjunct at the local community college. Mostly I just snap pictures around the neighborhood like the one above. Even before I photoshop it, the neighborhood looks surreal. It's deserted after the school bus leaves, except for us lone middle-aged people doing our daily fitness walks. Our development was built in the early 1980's and has a pre-McMansion ambiance about it. The spindly trees have grown out and it actually looks lusher each year. But our houses aren't as valuable as the newer developments. The development is considered "old," a pejorative term in this community.

Mother's Day

I had a benign Mother's Day. My husband and daughter made me breakfast and even did the dishes. We went out for Mexican food for dinner. Already I can feel the heat. I don't mean the food, spicy as it was, I mean the weather. There's such a short spring here and the hot, muggy weather stays until October. I'm not a hot weather person, so the summer stretches ahead of me like a steamy wasteland.

Tattered America

In my photo-taking walks through the neighborhood I come up these frayed American flags. Every Memorial Day weekend as long as we've lived here, a local real estate broker comes around and puts flags on the mailboxes (actually, her kids probably do the actual work) along with a flyer advertising her services. Patriotism and capitolism go hand in hand. The cheap flags inevitably start to disintegrate and they turn into a neighborhood eyesore. The mailbox pictured here belongs to a retired couple who I always have pleasant conversations when I run into them, but I keep it away from politics—they're conservative Republicans, a rarity in our liberal, multicultural neighborhood. They fly these bedraggled flags without irony.

Last Chance to Cocoon

A slippery winter storm hit the east coast today. A good day to stay inside, read, put miscellaneous stuff up for auction on eBay (it's amazing what people will buy). My French class is cancelled because of the weather, so I can skip conjugating those irregular verbs for another week or so. By this time tomorrow it will all be gone and I will have to assume adult responsibilities again. Alas.

Overcast at Last

A beautifully overcast day today. I grew up around the Great Lakes, and sometimes the weather here in New Jersey is just too temperate to me. And the sky, it's just too bland! I want tumultuous clouds, so today was pleasantly cloudly by my standards. I walked through the neighborhood taking pictures of the sky, looking eccentric—which is easy to do in a development as conventional as this one is. Once again, I wonder how we ended up in such a rigid place. After I got back, it hailed! I really got my drama. Now it's cleared up and I'm deposited back in my usual suburban reality, wondering what to do next.