this suburban life

These are the sounds around me now: the slow traversing of a plane across the sky; the chirping of a bird; the distant joyful yelling of children riding cardboard down a slide (I know where they are, even if I cannot see them); the on-again-off-again rustling of thousands of leaves shimmying against their neighbors above; the humming of car engines; the soft buzzing of a bee; the tic-tic-ticking as the breeze inches the wooden door at the back of the yard further and further open.

Beside me, lemons fatter than baseballs drip like heavy decorations from the extended tips of branches. Behind me, a weeping birch tree drips heart-laden tendrils downward toward my hair; a vine grows along the fence, pushing into my surroundings vibrantly red, tubular flowers that look like brass horns even if they are too small to make any songs. Sun fills half of the yard; shade the rest. The fading leaves of purple hydrangeas look cheerfully at me; above them, the long arms of my grandmother's wind chimes shine in the daylight and swing slightly but remain silent.

This is how I used to live—seated in the backyard, reading, writing, noticing the little details, keeping myself quietly entertained. As a child, I would never have been so surprised as I was one night recently to come face-to-face with an enormous raccoon right in the middle of my driveway; I would never have stared at him so long, nor wondered about his intentions. He was commonplace once; now, he is an at-first-spooky-but-soon-satisfying reminder of where I am living. Of how I am living. Here, in suburbia, where I am frightened by the plethora of BMWs parked on the street, the preppyness of the mothers, the closedness of shops on Sundays, I am also very happy; for the natural world abounds here, and the sun shines, and with it the air grows warm, not foggy or appallingly windy or cool; and the streets are walkable; the whole town is walkable; and I have nothing really to do here, not knowing more than one person in town, and so I am not overwhelmed with plans as I have been the past few years. I have nothing to do here and so I am doing all kinds of things I used to always do, like reading, and writing, and noticing the little details as I sit in the warm sun. San Francisco did not leave me dying to live in suburbia, but now that I am, I am finding all its good sides. There is an intense peacefulness to living like this. About that I cannot complain.