Suburban Thaw

Seattle begins to brighten around the time we lose an hour of sleep. The days get longer, and something bright that other places call “sun” begins to appear. During the first bright weekend, hints of the suburban thaw begin to show. Suburb dwellers peek out from their garages like gophers coming out of their holes. Suburbanites look around, scouting their neighbors’ houses, and sizing them up all in preparation for the magic that is the second bright weekend.

On the second bright weekend, the suburbs are all about business. Men emerge from their picture perfect homes with lawnmower and gardening tools in hand, ordering their children around like farm hands. Then begins the great front lawn pissing contest, where suburbanites believe that their lawn has to look Martha Stewart perfect, so that when this perfection is achieved, they can send nasty neighborhood association notices to their fellow suburbanites who choose not to participate in the yearly “my lawn is greener than your lawn” charade.

As you may have guessed, I’m not a participant, in fact, I usually opt to save my money during the winter to pay for a lawn service company to come out and get my yard ready for summer. I don’t like dirt or bugs or wasting a day digging in the dirt surrounded by bugs. This probably makes me a bad suburban dweller, but I could give a fuck.

During the suburban thaw you also begin to see the moms who take it upon themselves to monitor the safety of the neighborhood by letting you via a variety of hand signals that the 15 miles per hour you are traveling is way too fast for the delicate roads in this suburb tract. They seem to come in pairs staring at you beneath designer sunglasses with a baby strapped to the front of them and a heaping amount of judgment on their backs. These suburb moms are the kind who rudely tell you to do something, like you are one of their future spoiled asshole kids, and then end the sentence with a snide “thank you.”

As you may have guessed, I don’t fit in with this particular group either. You shouldn’t haul ass through a populated subdivision full of kids, but if you can’t come to a halt in two seconds while you are putting along at 15 mph, then you’re either on drugs or over the age of 70, which means that you should have restricted driving privileges anyways.

These moms also get very militant about the assortment of flowers that adorn their front lawn façade. They decorate themselves in the latest, most expensive gardening wear, and complete with the little foam pad to protect their knees, they huff, puff, dig and plant their blooms exchanging tips with fellow neighborhood flower mavens. They stroll along after they have completed their gardens and critique the front yards of those who live next to them. It’s quite a bitchy and petty task, but they are eager to do it.

As you may have guessed, I’m not one of these people, because I really don’t care what’s planted in my front yard, as long as I don’t have to do anything except cut it three times a year. I don’t care what color the flowers are in my yard as long as they don’t attract too many bees (again, it’s a bug thing). As long as my front yard looks half way decent, I’m a happy woman, who by the way, is perfectly within compliance with the Covenants, Codes, and Restrictions of the Neighborhood Association.

Along with lawn pissing contest dads and neighborhood safety monitor moms, I find a variety of sporting balls and poop from animals that don’t belong to me in my front yard, and the neighbor’s grass clippings near my curb. When I leave in the morning, I see the women of the Neighborhood Exercise Squad walking briskly dressed in their designer workout wear behind their exer-strollers with their small, poofy dogs following behind them. It’s at this moment that I wonder why I’m in such a bizarre area where there seems to exist a code of conduct that I didn’t get the rule book for. I smile and wave, but most of the time, they don’t return the disingenuous greeting. They have obviously figured out that I’m not one of them, unlike the broad who owned the house before I did; she fit in perfectly.

For now I exist in Suburbia, because if I told my husband I was seriously looking at moving, he would kill me, and my hope is that this will be a great neighborhood for Rachael to grow up in. If nothing else, living in this strange universe where everything appears normal, and people like me aren’t exactly welcome, provides me with the kind of daily friction I need to observe American suburb life and rip it to shreds. Viva la Suburbs!