Nostalgia
Small towns
Revisiting Suburban Charm
My roommate Hannah lives in Modesto, California, what we like to think of as the twin city of my hometown, Warrington, Pennsylvania. The towns are what we lovingly call “suburbs,” but both lean decidedly towards “in the middle of nowhere.” Technically, we live close enough to everything – we’re an hour away from a beach, a city, an airport – but our horizon lines hold only homogenous views of farmland or trees depending on the landscape of our respective states.
HOA-approved landscaping surrounds cookie-cutter houses in our neighborhoods. Along four flat main roads, forgotten bus stops divide the route to general stores and office parks. Buildings spring up along unkempt sidewalks, only to turn hollow within a few months. New gated communities composed of McMansions with absurdly large properties continuously shift school district regions, introducing new cliques and rivalries. Converse hang from telephone wires, and political stickers cling to stop signs on every corner. The counties hold no romance of big cities, no charm of the countryside.
When we drive into downtown areas, we scour streets for an empty parking spot before making the rounds on foot between eclectic coffee shops and boutiques. Sleek skylights illuminate the mazes of bookshelves at our public libraries, contrasting with the doric columns of historic buildings in which we played our first piano recitals. Skating rinks appeared each holiday break, barn houses held sets of the county troupes’ self-written plays, and local landmarks stood as backdrops for prom photos and family portraits. Every ordinary location transformed into our personal wonder of the world, mystified and obscured by suburban lore.
We attach memories to unassuming facades, hanging them on crooked branches and hiding them in dusty mailboxes. The field across from a popular childhood park holds the story of a student from my school who shot a deer to hang from our rival school’s bleachers on the night before our football game. The school’s mascot is the majestic buck – an animal which, frankly, overruns the county – and the mutilated carcass aimed to serve as a grim threat of their upcoming defeat (they won). Hannah conceals the memorial of her nine-year-old classmate whom she knew only as a tetherball queen, in her local church. Though the girl had passed away from an unexpected aneurysm before she had the chance to build close friendships, the Modesto residents poured in.
Hearing of this act of empathy wasn’t surprising to me in the least. At home, everyone knows everyone. We exchange greetings with retired elementary school teachers in grocery stores and can’t visit a Chipotle without running into a former classmate. Hannah and I now share identical updates from members of our respective graduating classes, but cringe at the thought of encountering certain peers in person. Do you remember that guy who used to wear an entire suit to class? Do you remember that girl who managed to stay in heels for the entire school day? What happened to them?
Those same characters, friends from preschool sandboxes and middle school musicals, began to make excuses for the new president in 2016. Their beliefs on race and economic ideologies surfaced—from seemingly nowhere—and contributed to our counties’ unique feature of being a primarily conservative area in proximity to liberal paradises. Trump signs decorate more lawns than we’d like to admit, and we’ve faced harassment and almost-comedic ignorance from our peers. In 2016, our counties bled red. All that we retained from that year is a perverse sense of pride一satisfaction that we “survived”一and horror stories of casual racism and sexism that shock our Berkeley peers.
Still, high school provided both of us with the same mindless fun and harmless angst, bottled in memories of homecoming games and senior trips. We sat on ripped school bus seats, whispering and giggling with friends. We watched sunrises from classroom windows and cheered under the glare of stadium lights. We found microcosms and niches which stoked our current passions, found mentors who encouraged us to aspire for something greater than what we had. For the most part, our lives were simple: the weekly cycle of mundane English assignments, biology labs, and extracurriculars.
Our ordinary lives inspired a love for the quiet joys of suburban life. Each season comes with its own checklist of activities, the clichés most people think are reserved for Hallmark and Disney Channel movies. The melodies of ice cream trucks linger in sweet recollections of sweltering summers; the sight of Christmas lights tangled around lamp posts brighten recollections of bitter winters. We still relish in taking the long way home, blasting obnoxiously loud music as we drive past stretches of corn fields, dairy farms, and orchards. The same hiking spots and public parks hold our footprints each year, the sidewalks twist the same way on our families’ standard twilight-lit walks. Everything will remain familiar in every sense of the word一intimate, on a family footing.
Hannah and I never dreamed of an escape. Our arrival at Berkeley did not wash away our love for suburbia’s simplicity, nor did it cause us to distance our personalities from home. We return whenever possible to elementary playgrounds with freshly installed swing sets and shopping centers with stores we’ve never heard of. There will be a time when we no longer reside in our idle towns for longer than a week, instead, passing through as visitors. We will point out memories to loved ones as we drive by—Do you remember when we used to bike there? Do you remember when we visited that park for the first time? Do you remember when this town used to be our whole world?
Words: Anjika Pai
