Last night, we had our summer kickoff: the first backyard cookout and campfire of the season. To clarify for our Bristow – and other ahem, suburban – friends, this is not your neighbor’s BBQ. Our house, an unimpressive 2100 square feet, is not the place to host during the winter months, but our backyard during the summer months is just the spot. Sitting on two acres, backing up to a farm to give the impression of even more land, at the end of a quiet street, we have ample room for backyard fun.
We also have quite a bit of “country” in us. Although I sometimes long to live in one of the beautiful two-story brick houses on the manicured lawns of the subdivisions where some of our friends live, the HOA would never go for the decrepit red truck Husband bought off a guy in Purcellville for $500, nor would they be pleased with our pop-up camper, the toys and bikes strewn carelessly around the yard or the mismatched chairs set up around our campfire ring.
One morning, a few summers ago, before I’d embraced the whole of who I am, I walked outside to my chaos-filled yard and filled with shame and anger, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Where are you kids? Put this crap away! I am not white trash!”
In the moment I yelled it, I heard the fear and falsity. Oh my God, I realized. I am part white trash.
I grew up on 50+ acres in Southern Virginia with an aluminum above ground pool in the side yard that was never quite level and therefore offered both a shallow end and a deep(er) end (said pool was also surrounded by weeds since my family had never landscaped around it and apparently didn’t have a love affair with the weed wacker).
We also had a rundown shack in the yard: a “fixer upper” that was on the property when we bought it but never got fixed. My grandmother envisioned an art studio: it ended up being a shed without a door.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Rooney Appliance truck that my grandfather used to move all of our furniture down from Bergen County, New Jersey. It died on the other side of our house – across from the shack – how apropos – and there it rots to this day.
So in my adulthood, having run (I thought far away) from my childhood shame, I do have my days when I overreact to my husband’s eyesore truck, my kids’ toys strewn across the yard, and my own unfinished projects like the screened in porch that is no longer screened in, or – in spite of its expensive Pier One furniture – clean enough to enjoy.
And then there’s the love/hate relationship I’ve had with the suburbs since I was a little girl. Until I was 7, we lived in the Country Club Estates in Bergen County, New Jersey. This was a nice neighborhood with a golf course (saw it once) and a pool (never swam in it). I had plenty of friends to play with (or so I tell myself even though the only one I remember distinctly is Heather Balzazac who lived at least six houses away), and one of my many childhood adventures included walking around our neighborhood selling – not Girl Scout cookies but Avon samples – to unsuspecting housewives.
Then when I was going into the second grade – the same age Youngest Daughter is right now – I was uprooted from the relative comfort and convenience of the snooty suburbs to the wilds of country living in Southern Virginia.
I didn’t know what to make of the isolation at first.
Because the land was cheap compared to New Jersey, my grandparents were able to buy a whopping 59 ½ acres. To reach our house, we clunked down a clay “driveway” that was almost a mile long. If I wanted to play with another kid, I had to be driven to their house in our wood-paneled Grand Safari station wagon.
Growing up to the sound of the whippoorwill at nights and grasshoppers during the day, I became introspective, and my life-long love affair with reading and writing began – probably because there was nothing else to do.
We live in the “city” of Nokesville as opposed to the sprawling Nokesville countryside of 10 acre lots and old farms. Our Nokesville friends – and others who have departed Northern Virginia to delve even deeper into the countryside of Culpeper, Greene County, and Rappahannock – laugh at us when we tell them we think of ourselves as “country” people. I suppose they’ve got a point. We do, after all, have streetlights.
In a way, our children have the best and worst of both worlds. They are neither on a busy suburban cul-de-sac teeming with kids on scooters with easy access to a community pool, nor are they learning about life on a farm, fishing in their own pond, or riding horses. Not far from us is a handful of same-age kids, and now that everyone’s old enough to grab a bike and ride to each other’s houses, their universe has quadrupled. Our street is popular because it’s a dead-end, and I envision for our family a summer filled with friends hanging out in the backyard playing badminton and shooting hoops. However, our endeavors do require some effort and communication … it is not Bristow where block parties naturally unfold when one Mom sits outside in a camp chair on her driveway with a glass of wine watching her preschooler ride on her Barbie bike and is spotted by another Mom with a toddler in tow fisting sidewalk chalk.
For the past few years, we’ve put up a medium sized Intex swimming pool, but the kids had pretty much outgrown it last summer, so we took it down and haven’t committed to the next one in size which stays up year-round. That means we’ll be sniffing around for invites to our friends’ pools – be they backyard do-it-yourselfers or community pools requiring passes. I also took the kids to the Vint Hill Farms Station pool last summer and liked it so we’ll probably be heading there as well, but the fact of the matter is my kids have reached the age where the common question is “Can I bring a friend?” which requires planning and schedule coordination – both of which can be a challenge especially in the summer months.
This makes me pine for the house-lined streets only a few miles from here where the cul-de-sac kids can venture out on their own and stumble across a playmate and where their parents – unwinding from a long day of work and responsibilities – gather informally in someone’s driveway or on someone’s back porch.
I guess no matter which lifestyle you live, we all have those “grass is greener” moments when we yearn for what we don’t have.
A few years ago we felt we’d outgrown our house and went looking for a replacement. The neighborhood we liked the most was right across the Fauquier line, the houses neatly lined up next to one another, some of them looking out on a lake and all of them with ready access to well-made trails that ran alongside some trees the developers had quite thoughtfully left standing; these trails led to tennis courts and a pool brimming with beautiful chlorinated water.
We didn’t buy that house. In the end, we decided the price was too high – our mortgage would double, and we’d have an HOA fee. While I was staring at the lake, listening to the sound of children playing and dreaming of a life of modern convenience, my husband looked at the property line for the house next to the one we were eyeing, and asked, “What if they have a dog that won’t stop barking?”
Sometimes, I still drive past that house and look at all the families with whom we might have had backyard cookouts. We couldn’t have had a Nokesville campfire; rather, we’d be looking at the orange flames licking the sides of a pot belly stove or the blue tinged flames of one of those new fangled outdoor fireplaces.
The people in that subdivision standing in their driveways, pushing strollers accompanied by older children on bicycles, look like nice people, but then I turn my car back to Nokesville where we’ve lived on the same street for the past 20 years: part-country-part-“city” where, for now at least, my heart beats and belongs.
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