Upon seeing our house for the first time, we fell in love with the backyard.
The main attraction was a secluded patio, a physical manifestation of the exact reason why we wanted to leave the city for the suburbs. Here was an outdoor space of our own where we could read, drink coffee, and hang out. We could even put a grill in the corner and voila; the American dream.
As it turns out, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Our first daughter was born 3 weeks after we moved in. By the next summer, it became glaringly obvious that the vision that I had for our outdoor space was not to be. For it was a vision cluelessly concocted by my former DINK self, who had no idea that every aspect of our house would be fully subsumed the nonsensical whims of our young children.
What I mean is that we overlooked some major hazards that adults without young kids don’t register. For one, there was the overgrown, likely poison-ivy ridden brush that our girls found more alluring than the two small grass patches adjacent to it.
There was also a stone-walled garden with expensive perennials that was technically very nice, but was practically a menace to child safety. Then there was the tight walkway and set of stairs, that required an emergency safety gate Home Depot order after Older Daughter nearly knocked her teeth out.
Instead of the envisioned oasis, it became a major source of stress. I dreaded going out to the backyard.
Now three years into home ownership, we’ve resolved to slowly make the house our own. This is much easier said than done, as the cost of home maintenance alone is an unworkable math problem even when you don’t throw in the cost and stressors of childcare, the price of everything at the grocery store, and dozens of other factors that I’ll refrain from listing.
But we figured that three years in we should start with something, and that something was our backyard.
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All of that to say: this past spring, we did a moderate-sized renovation on our backyard. It’s nowhere near the final vision we have, but significant enough that our outdoor space is substantially transformed.
The overgrown brush is now gone, merging two smaller grass spaces into a single continuous one. The walled garden and tight walkway have been removed, with an extended patio in its place. A railing has been installed so that our 15 month-old can’t dive headfirst off of the landing as she so desperately wants to.
The work was sizable and expensive enough that it’s become a small talking point in my catch-up repertoire, and we’re starting to have people over to show it off. We bought a few select outdoor toys for the girls; one of those gigantic play houses, a sandbox, a bubble lawnmower.
Most evenings it’s a complete mess, a sure sign that it’s now an officially incorporated part of our home.
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A few weeks ago our daughters grew tired of these various backyard attractions, but we still had a lot of time to kill before bath and bedtime. We ended up going for a family walk around our neighborhood.
Previously a staple of our evening routine, this was our first family walk in weeks. As such, we weren’t as attuned to the pre-dusk rhythms of our street, or what the urban theorist Jane Jacobs calls the “intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”1
My wife commented that it felt like she hadn’t seen our neighbors in forever.
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A few years ago, I read Wait Till Next Year by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Arguably the best presidential historian of all-time, this book is a departure from her typical work. Instead of a deep dive into the machinations of Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, it’s an excellent memoir of her growing up in Rockville Centre, Long Island while obsessing over the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Any baseball fan knows that the novel is building toward the ultimate departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. Several years later, the memoir has stayed with me because of the powerful way she contextualizes the Dodgers’ move to LA with the broader changes sweeping both the nation and local neighborhoods.
Goodwin spends her youth engaged in playful baseball ribbing with the local butcher and playing in the street with her friends; the type of long gone childhood in which the parents call out to their kids that dinner is ready. One with no screens (not even television) that engenders and encourages thick communal bonds. The polar opposite of this hilarious Sebastian Maniscalco bit about how people now react when someone rings the doorbell.
“For as long as I could remember, our family had been on intimate terms with every neighbor on our block,” says Goodwin. She then talks about the technological, economic, and social factors that prompted families to grow out of the neighborhood and move on.
“Though they were sad to leave, the lure of more bedrooms and larger rooms proved irresistible,” she notes.
“The ties which had held our block together began to loosen…The street was no longer our common ground. Television, once a source of community, had become an isolating force. The corner stores continued to provide a common meeting place, but competition from two new supermarkets, Bohack’s and A & P, would soon diminish traffic to the butcher shop and delicatessen….in the years to come, one by one, the family owned stores would disappear: the soda shop would be the first to go, then the butcher shop with Max and Joe, and finally the drugstore.”
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We have gained a lot with our backyard. This past father’s day, I grilled as our families came over to enjoy the space and play with our girls. In many ways this was a picturesque day straight out of the brochure of a politician who is advertising the prosperity that his proposed policies will bring.
But we’ve also lost something. Not remotely at the scale of what Goodwin is describing, but something nonetheless.
I’m not sure exactly what it is, and I’m probably not going to spend too much time searching for it. There’s chalk littered all across the lawn and I should probably clean it up.
1 I am somewhat misrepresenting this quote, as Jane Jacobs was much more talking about the streets of Lower Manhattan and not Westchester County. But our town is much more walkable than many “pure driving” suburbs, and the houses are close together. I would argue that some of Jacobs’ points about city life apply (although some certainly do not).
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