The bustle of city life descends on the suburbs

It was a Saturday in the summer of 1962. I remember because it was the year before I would get my driver’s license.

My mother was my chauffeur, driving us home from South Shore Plaza in Braintree where we worked, she as the manager of Wethern’s, a hat shop, and I as a part-time “salesgirl” (that was the word back then) at Cummings, a woman’s clothing store.

My mother had cut through a new and still growing neighborhood and had come to a dead stop at an intersection where, in front of us, stood a house that could have been on the cover of House Beautiful. I was used to my mother hitting the brakes and gazing at houses. She grew up in tenements where the only hints of green were the weeds that flourished in the cracks of concrete. When she and my father bought their unfinished Cape Cod in Randolph in 1954, it was, for her, the culmination of a dream.

“I met the woman who owns that house today,” my mother announced as the car idled, “She came into the store.”

I turned to take a better look at the house. It was longer than ours, a ranch, not a Cape, and it had a brick front and windows with shutters and it sat on a small hill surrounded by what looked like a forest of trees. It was a pretty house, for sure. But what made it beautiful were the trees that embraced it. “She said her husband worked two jobs for that house. And how they chose it because of the quiet and the trees and the privacy.”

Did my mother tell me then that some corporation had purchased not the lot where the house stood, but all of the adjacent land with all of the trees? I don’t think so. I think this news came later because for the longest time after I got my license, whenever I drove down this road and past this house, I would remember a woman I never met, whose life I only imagined, surrounded and buffered by beauty. And for some reason thinking about her and this story buffered me, too.

It’s been decades since those trees were bulldozed to make way for a sprawling, ugly business complex. The house still sits on its hill, but it sits diminished, an anomaly among all the concrete. People driving by, strangers to the history, probably look at it and wonder why would anyone build a home there?

There used to be a sign at the top of my street in Canton that said: Truck Route. It wasn’t always a truck route. For most of its existence, my two-lane street was a tree-lined country road. Even now, it’s designated by the town as a “scenic way.” But on most mornings, all that’s to be seen on this scenic way are cars and trucks and motorcycles groaning and thudding and squeaking and honking and screeching their way to wherever they’re headed.

We used to have three big oak trees in our front yard. They were grand and beautiful things. I watched birds nest in them and squirrels swing from them. When the hostages were freed in January, 1981, in Iran, I tied yellow ribbons on their branches. The trees didn’t die suddenly, victims of disease. They died slowly, one by one, victims of traffic and polluted air and modern life.

I notice these days all the miles and miles of soundproof barriers along highways and exits off highways. I notice houses that used to be surrounded by green surrounded now by cement and concrete. Every time I drive down a road that was a country road that once slinked its way through neighborhoods; every time I close my front door because of the clatter of trucks; every time what was a thin scar across the land gets ripped open and made wider, I am reminded of a woman I never knew and her dream house on the hill.

And I think: She was there first. We were here first, our front doors open, a breeze drifting in. We could hear birds. We could smell rain. In winter, we could hear silence.

People move from the city to the suburbs for space and lawns and quiet and fresh air. What they do not expect, what they do not anticipate, is that one day they may open a window or stand at their front door or look up from their garden and realize that what they thought they left behind, has moved with them.