A Walker in the Suburbs

On days when there’s no time to walk, only time to drive, the radio sustains me. The last 24 hours have been like that.

Yesterday I heard an interview with filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, who explained why, after stints in Britain and the United States, he is once again living in his native India:

“You can stand in one place and look to your right, and you see a funeral. Look to your left, and you see a marriage. Look in front of you, and you see little children that are born and are starving in the streets. And look behind you, and somebody’s driving a Bentley,” he says. “You’re suddenly faced with the contradictions of just living, and you realize just how mortal you are. And in that mortality, you’re pushed into the idea that life is not under your control — it’s completely chaotic.” This chaos keeps him on edge, Kapur says, keeps “more creatively alive.”

And then, on this morning’s “Writer’s Almanac,” these words from the novelist Andrea Barrett: “I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. … We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. … You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.”

The radio provides aural sustenance; this photo of Hallstatt, Austria provides visual sustenance.

This morning before work I look down the second-floor hallway. All three doors are closed. All three girls are home and sleeping in their rooms rather than the basement, the couch in the office or on the deck.

I pause for a moment at the top of the stairs, savoring the rightness of this, knowing, even as a I savor, how rare and precious it is.

The hall in this half light is cropped and close; in it, we seem more together than apart.

The beach reading begins before the beach. Riding to the office on Metro, I whip out Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun and imagine I am in Cortona, Italy. I am buying old linens from a market vendor, haggling with questionable Mussolini-lookalike contractors and whisking up some cold fennel soup.

I laugh to myself as I imagine the title: Under the Suburban Sun. I think about my day, the rush to board the Orange Line, the crammed commute, a quick run through the supermarket on the way home, maneuvering the northern Virginia traffic.

In her book Mayes includes recipes for polenta with sausage and fennel or rabbit with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. My recipes would include BLTs and fruit. Microwave the bacon. Toast the bread. Slice the tomatoes and cantaloupe. Grab a plate and stroll to the deck.

There is no Lombardy poplar on a Tuscan hillside, no golden shimmer in the air. But the evening sun throws squares of light on the trees, and the begonias and coleus are at their most beguiling. It’s another day in paradise.

The land here rises and falls, colts gallop in tree-lined pastures and hedges hang low over meadows. It is, topographically speaking, not unlike the place I grew up. Horse country, semi-southern, a gentle clime.

But there are differences, too. And those are what I think about now that I’m home again. I think about the faces of my classmates, people I hadn’t seen in years but who are as familiar to me as if I’d met them yesterday. I think about knowing not just these people themselves, but their parents and brothers and sisters. It is the deep bench, the belief that there is much in reserve. It is the rootedness of long acquaintance.

Sometimes we talk about what’s next. Where will we live when our youngest graduates? Will it be city or country or (once again) somewhere in between? We never finish these discussions.

More than 20 years in the suburbs have narrowed my vision and worn me out. I don’t know where I want to end up. But I do know this: I want a view.

The house is so still without our little bird, so quiet and ordinary. It lacks the ambient sounds of a parakeet in motion. I don’t turn on the radio as much as I used to, because it reminds me of him, too, and so the quiet is compounded.

Into this void has come the winter fire, which lights the hearth, opens clogged sinuses and fills the house with smoke. (We need our chimney cleaned, I think.) What it also does, I’ve noticed recently, is provide some much needed noise.

The fire roars and crackles. It provides some of the background sound I’ve been missing so much since Hermes died. It doesn’t replace him, of course, not in the least, but it is a slight consolation.

Sitting beside a fire is like keeping company with a wild animal; there is a hint of danger in the sudden shifting of wood, the burning log that falls from the grate. Outside the temperature falls, the wind sighs. Inside, our hearth is bright — rhe consolation of a winter fire.

Cold weather keeps a walker close to home. This means I’m once again a student of minute differences, noticing small changes to the landscape around me, a tree down in the forest, a garland on a mailbox, a new gathering spot for crows.

It is good to focus on what is in front of me; it doesn’t seem limiting in the least. The familiar can be full of surprises.

I read today that Builder magazine has come up with its concept home for 2010. It’s called a “Home for the New Economy,” and it’s 1,700 square feet. Previous concept homes have been as large as 6,000 square feet, so this is quite a departure. The article goes on to say that it will take time before homeowners embrace the smaller-is-better concept of this concept home. And certainly where we live, McMansions still rule (see above).

But the “Home for the New Economy” makes me feel vindicated. We live comfortably in a 2000-square foot house with a room for every child, a cozy former dining room that long ago became our ersatz family room and a kitchen where we —— and most people who visit us —— spend most of our time. There isn’t as much house to clean or pay for and, best of all, the small house keeps us together. Where we belong.