human suburbia

are we all just cookie-cutter houses?

My first apartment that I lived in completely alone was 100 years old. My landlord, a classic songwriter-type in Nashville who had written for Elvis, had converted the old house into a triplex. It was creaky, a bit musty, and definitely cold. There was no dishwasher, and the floors buckled in some places.

But I loved it.

I wondered why I loved it immediately, when I first stepped inside. Something in me said “This is my home.” It was the last place I lived before getting married—to me, looking back on “Wellington Avenue” means looking back on my last season of dedicated solitude. It was sacred, for more reasons than I can name. But the house itself was also…real.

My husband and I kept the trend going by moving into an 1924 farmhouse—also updated and converted into a duplex in the midst of the growing Nashville population. We loved this place, too. It was less creaky, and had a dishwasher. It, too, was real.

I live in a house that’s pretty basic suburbia now, in the 70’s Florida style (think kind of Brady Bunch, but your dad’s not the architect, and everything is cinderblock). It’s a home because the people I love are in it, but the house itself feels stale compared to the places I’ve inhabited in the past decade. It’s safe and comfortable, and I’m grateful for it. But the house itself doesn’t feel…real.

A home often used to be built by the inhabitants themselves, their hands shaping the actual brick and mortar. There was something of themselves in it, in the arched doorways and fireplaces and even impulsively painted kitchen cabinets. What was in the home was beautiful, but if you walked through it empty, you got a sense of what–or who–it was. I guess I’m thinking that we used to care about houses being real, that we wanted wood and stone and brick—not just because it was all we had, but because we knew what we had was good. We didn’t just put up houses because we wanted to make cash quickly, and we didn’t care if they were cookie-cutter and had no individuality. Suburbia is a certain kind of “flattening,” to borrow from

Matthew B. Crawford

. The homogenization of homes feels like a symbol, in a way, of our own homogenization. Suburban homes are distinguished by their landscaping, their decor, anything but themselves. So it is with us.

People used to be real, to be made of wood and stone and brick, in a metaphorical sense. Culture was not determined by trends as much as the stuff that could be relied on, the truth of being human that got us through. And we certainly weren’t determined by our decor and our landscaping—the superficial shit that we can’t take with us—but by the real, the mind-boggling and glorious combination of mind, body and soul that we are. There is nothing uniform, homogenized, flat about us, unless we allow it to be so.

I know people who don’t know that they’re made of real stuff, and instead have agreed to just be copies of everyone else, made of sheetrock and drywall and grey paint (why so much grey paint?). Walking through culture feels like walking through a suburban neighborhood where there’s more of the same, each trying to distinguish themselves by how they’re decorated, not by who they are. Where did you go to school? What did you study? How many accounts did you close this month? What tax bracket are you in? What brands of clothing do you wear? People of faith are no exception–we wear our faith like a brand too these days. We decorate ourselves, but if you walk through us empty–stripped of all that–you wouldn’t, and maybe we wouldn’t, know who we are.

We talk about houses with “character.” Character often means that the house has a charming individuality–an assertion that though it has its flaws, it should most certainly not be bulldozed so a row of townhouses can take up its place. Wellington Avenue was like that. I’m sure my landlord had offers to bulldoze it, but he refused, and I love him for that. The house had character because it was not perfect, because it didn’t put on a show. It asked to be accepted and inhabited as it was. I want to be like that. I want people to walk through me empty and know who I am, and know that I’m home that way. I want to treat other people like that’s true about them, too.

Because just as I know people who don’t know the character they have, I know people who make me feel at home like Wellington Avenue did. I walk into their presence and I know, immediately, that they are real—that they are attuned to the radically transcendent and simultaneously gritty art of being human. Those are the people, and the homes, I will always long to inhabit, and will always strive to be. Maybe they are a bit creaky, maybe they don’t have a dishwasher, and maybe they’re even a little cold, but they’re real. Thank God, they are real.