September 21, 2010
My Suburbs.
Thinking back on my childhood, there are three things that immediately pop to mind: snakes, bats, and the old stump of what was probably an oak that was just large enough to make a fantastic pedestal for an eight-year-old.
The fourth thing, coming immediately on the heels of those, was the utter insistence of the people around me that fantasy and adventure happened elsewhere. At the beach, maybe, or in the woods of the mountains where we’d go camping, or in Grandma and Grandpa’s huge backyard with the twisty crabapples and the bamboo and the big holly I could climb like a ladder. But those were all not home: fantasy and wonder are for wild places, or quarter-acre backyards that seem wild and vast to a gradeschooler. Not for cities. Not for suburbs.
Even now, that attitude persists. Except now, at least, some people are reclaiming the fantasy of a city, the cracks and nooks and crannies where faeries hide, and have hidden since Ur, waiting for us to notice.
But the cities are always figured, in such reclaiming, as wildernesses, as jungles, and again I am told that wild places are where wonder lies, and where I need to go to seek it, and the various suburbs which I’ve haunted all my life are too mundane, too boring, too cookie-cutter conformity to house fantasy.
Clearly, these naysayers haven’t looked very hard.
There are just as many nooks and crannies and strange straggling wild things in a suburb as in a city, or in the mythic wild itself. There are great dark lobster-pots, big enough to serve as boats for children adventuring in their pantry. There are snakes curling across the sidewalk, or under the bush, or in the pool, bats in the fireplace like demons emerging from the embers of hell, foxes curled up on driveways as if the cars were holding the spot for them, butterflies battering kamikaze-style at your windows, hard black walnuts falling on your head with unerring, unnerving accuracy, crows chattering with your cat every morning, fey-touched things all. There are smoky sneaky ghosts like puffs of mist creeping across your carpet, and shadow voices in the night, rattling down the air vents, and the not-quite-people that wander your halls at night and watch you as you scarper along. There are brownies, and boggles, and bogeymen, and bunnymen, and nightmares, and dreamlings, and woody-hags; there are croakie frogs and cats and bats and little blue geckos and the occasional mighty cougar walking down your quiet streets.
These are the fey things: the loose brick in your wall, the wiggly flagstone on your path, the cobbles that don’t – quite – match. The storm drains sucking down hurricane waters like great thirsty giants, and if you turn fast enough you might see a troll peeping from under its newfangled bridge. If you step into your yawing closet, you might step out in fairyland; if you’re willing, look in the flowers, under the leaf-piles, in the runoff, up in the eaves, and you will find your wonder.
There are great strangenesses everywhere, and no place is too normal, too human, too bland, to house some.
The strangenesses, the little wonders, make those things normal, in the profound way real things are.
