The Hood

My dad is going to be super unimpressed by what I'm about to say.

I live in a hippie neighborhood.  And I love it.

When I was in college, I would drive through the neighborhood I live in now with my friend Heidi, and we would say things like, "If I could live anywhere in Albuquerque, this would be it."  We now both live in this neighborhood.  Life throws you for unexpected loops like that.  

This neighborhood is just a street north of Albuquerque's famous Nob Hill neighborhood.  I'm not exactly sure what my neighborhood is called.  I've seen signs saying Altura Neighborhood, Washington Street Neighborhood, and North Campus Neighborhood.  Even now, as I look at Google Maps, it is telling me Pueblo Alto Neighborhood, which I've never heard--so, who knows.  The name isn't the point.  The point is that it is wonderful, and just what a neighborhood should be.  

When I was growing up in Artesia, I lived in a neighborhood where people lived normally and did normal, real-life things.  We watered our lawn whenever it needed watering, and when our grass was too tall, my dad or my brother would mow it.  When our driveway was covered in dirt (happens in southeast New Mexico), my parents would sweep it.  Kids (including my brother and I) would ride bikes, play driveway basketball, draw Tic-Tac-Toe games with chalk on the sidewalks, and come home for dinner at the whistle of their dad from the front porch.  We would walk or bike to and from school with the neighborhood kids, without a single hesitation from our mothers.  We would take our trash to the dumpsters in the alley, which were emptied weekly by a garbage truck.  In the summers, we would let the sprinkler run for hours while we hopped back and forth through it to keep cool--the dog running, biting through it with us.  

In the evenings and on weekends, people would walk their dogs, and stand in their yards and talk about their children's school teachers or their latest do-it-yourself project with their neighbors. 

Ah, the good ol' days, huh?  The quality of life was good.  People did not seem to be living out of their means, and we were in love with life and the small town with which we belonged.  I'm sure not much has changed.  

As I'm writing this, enveloped by nostalgia, it occurs to me that I have a completely naive perspective on where I grew up.  As I think back now with my "adult brain," I realize that gun shots were often heard just three blocks to the east.  A man was murdered in his ex-wife's front yard when I was 13-years-old just three blocks from my house on the same street.  Just thirty yards from my beloved childhood home, was a rundown, stucco, eight-unit, poverty-stricken apartment building.  One afternoon, an undercover police office asked my mother if he could stake out the apartments from our front lawn.  My mother tried to shield my brother and I from the echoing late night noise and the naked bodies that graced the top floor.

Behind the manicured lawns and the joyful children, were destructive families that couldn't shake the grip of divorce and drugs and depression.

But the neighborhood was real.  There is no doubt about that.  Real lives, real people, doing real things. 

When my parents moved to Murphy, a northeast suburb of Dallas,  in the summer of 2011, we all realized how much "normal life" as we knew it was now over.  People in your own neighborhood were no longer waving to you.  In fact, they were no longer even spending any time at all their front yard.  The extent of activity in pristine front yards was the weekly presence of brown-skinned laborers--doing the "normal" work for the rich.  One morning, my mother was in the front yard picking some weeds and was scoffed at by two women in their upscale "workout" clothes, "Is she picking her own weeds (gasp)?"  

Neighbors would pull in to their garages and wait until the garage door came to a complete closure before exiting their vehicles.  No sign of any neighborly normal as we knew it.  Mothers of luxury and live-in nannies had to go inside the school building to retrieve their children--the reality of walking home with the neighborhood kids did not exist there.

My parents started referring to their new strange way-of-life as "Polycartville."  This came from the absence of dumpsters and being forced to implement the "prissy" way of disposing of trash by placing a large trash bin at the edge of your curb once a week for the garbage truck to empty.  

In Polycartville, you couldn't even have your own garage sale--no, of course not, that would be tacky.  You couldn't leave parked cars along the curb, unless it was your "help" coming to clean the pool, mow your lawn, or even clean your aquarium.  Polycartville didn't allow any flag flying, front-facing garages, and a number of other "normal-life" things.  This is a neighborhood for the rich, and you better act rich while you live here, or you'll get a nasty letter from the neighborhood homeowner's association (HOA).

I must give my mother credit, though.  For any of you who have not met my mother, you are missing out. She didn't let the annoyances of Polycartville stop her from doing somewhat normal things.  She made friends with the neighborhood women, still wore her workout clothes from Target, and still went out in the front yard to pick her own weeds.  (Although she did hire a pool boy.)  She adapted well.  She's a champ.  You should meet her.  

I'm not sure how I got all twisted off on that whole thing, but the point was to discuss my new neighborhood.  I guess I felt that background was necessary for you to understand where I'm going with my new neighborhood praise.  My new neighborhood is beautiful.  Not a single home looks like the rest.  It's old, and has large, overgrown trees and vegetation.  Each yard is different and unique, there are parks throughout and often.  People are walking their dogs, kids are skateboarding, my neighbor up the road has a self-created sandbox in his/her yard.  People live sustainable, wholesome, healthy lives.  

In our neighborhood, we have healthy grocery stores and safe streets and parks to be active in.  When out for my walks, I see men working on their cars, people walking their dogs, kids playing soccer, and a yoga class in the park.  The grass is green and lush.  The trees provide relief from the golden New Mexican sun.  There are recycling bins (come on people, its time we got real about the benefits of recycling #realtalk).  People keep up their old homes, as my parents once did in their old home.  When something breaks, they fix it.  People know their neighbors and pet each others' dogs.  

This was taken on one of my walks a few days ago.  This house is on my same street. I cannot describe the joy this brought me.  Neighbors encouraging neighbors to be artistic and creative.  I'm no poet, but I support this endeavor so much, that I will attempt to write one.

The quality of life in my neighborhood is good, sustainable, stable, kind, and naturally beautiful.  I'm happy to be here, and when neighbors feel like that, that's when our quality of life goes up.

If I'm being thoughtful, and we all know that's what I do--sit around and think and over-think and rethink, I feel like all these qualities are missing in the more "conservative" neighborhoods.  Perhaps the hippie/free-spirited lifestyle is more "neighborly" and lends itself to the idea of living healthy and being in sync with one's surroundings.  In this neighborhood, there are weird things in people's front yards, like couches, and sandboxes, and campers.  No one gets mad about that.  There is no HOA telling you that you can't have that stuff on your own property.  People who live in this neighborhood have embraced that those things are all part of real life.

After all, who wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood like that?