No matter when or where you have lived in the suburbs, if you have lived in the suburbs, you will have experienced the strange happenings, seen the odd houses, or been concerned about some of the other people who live there.
Listed are the top ten mysteries of suburban life:
- Are those people next door raising raccoons?
- Why are there so many different cars at that house, but almost never any sign of humans?
- Are the people who live in this house as wild as their front yard? Why do these people have the same unruly acreage as me?
- When will the neighbors ever be done putting on that addition to their house?
- Why is the neighbor’s mailbox on the ground?
- What exactly is under the tarp in the side yard?
- Why are those one neighbors so noisy all night long?
- Even more mysterious, why are those other neighbors so quiet all day and all night? Does anyone even live at that house?
- How many times a day does that guy mow his lawn?
- Why is this fence so high? Why is the tallest part around the front yard? What are they hiding?
As a quick rubric, suburb life is a subset of urban life. Just outside of the city is where suburbs lie.
Did you know the word suburbs is in the Bible? The idea of living near a city center is almost as old as life itself. Even back then there was probably a weird guy who stored his ladder on his roof “because it’s safe from thieves up there.” Even back then there were probably those guys who had a garage full of tools so they could supercharge their chariots. Even back then, at the beginning of written history, there were likely people who made their mailboxes look like a beagle or a steam train or the Batmobile.
These days we have people with “smart” homes, where nothing works when there’s a power outage. Those neighbors are the ones you find sitting at the park or wandering around the block aimlessly when there’s an outage. They seem to be bereft of purpose when there’s no electricity.
These days we have people with electric fences and guard dogs and gun safes. They’re also the ones we find at the police station, begging for help because a deer got into the flower garden.
And these days we have great neighbors who will lend us a ladder, so we can retrieve ours from where we left it on the roof.
Xenosthesia.com 