My suburban childhood

I grew up in the suburbs. Wide lawns, front and back, with tulips, roses, and raspberry bushes. My dad grew green beans on a chicken-wire trellis at the side of the house. The neighbours had a swimming pool. In our backyard, there were big trees, which my dad said were older than the house, part of a tree line marking a field edge from before the neighbourhood had been built.

I liked to lie on my back on our grass and look up into those trees. Squirrels chased each other all afternoon along their branch highways, and I imagined an older time when those trees looked down on a different landscape. Was our garden a field of vegetables? Or corn? Wheat or grazing space?

There would have been different horizons then and more wind moving unhindered. I imagined its ripple in tall grasses above my head. And a farmhouse in the distance, with light shining in the windows, people coming in from their work. Sunsets. Evenings. Grace around the table. At night, there would have been brighter stars.

Before the farm, the land was wooded. I imagined more trees.

The neighbourhood was developed in the 1960s and, for some reason, most of the streets were named after Indigenous communities from British Columbia. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that this struck me as odd. Qualicum. Kitimat. Okanagan. Aleutian. Why reach so far to claim disconnected names? Maybe as an answer, the developers planted cedar hedges between the gardens. I remember the smell of cedar in winter when my brother and I built our snow-forts up against their dark heaviness, their hidden tunnels against the wind.

There was a creek in the neighbourhood, too, and my parents said we weren’t to play there, but we did anyway. I’d like to say we played there because it felt wild or close to creation, but it didn’t, or not in a natural way. We felt wild there, but the creek felt contained. There was a concrete culvert that ran under the road, and we had to climb a chain-link fence to get there. We took off our shoes and waded in the water. I can’t remember the bottom of the creek, only how cold the water was, which felt connected to the concrete and the busy road above us.

I would think about these things from the backseat of the car when we drove out to my dad’s cousin’s farm in the country, past ditches and culverts, current working farms with their open spaces. I wondered if these fields would someday be covered with houses. I wondered where the food would come from then if they were.

At dinner on the farm, we would be polite and say please and thank you and drink cold milk from tall glasses which we never did at home at dinner, only at breakfast time. Then, afterwards, we walked down to the river to collect the cows. They liked to spend time there on hot summer evenings. They flicked their tails at flies and walked solidly in front of us, back towards the barn, heavy, patient, plodding together. I thought they had beautiful, knowing eyes.