CDE CDE Ode to the Suburbs

I have been thinking a lot about the rhythms of place.

Where I live, where I have lived for most of my life, regardless of what country I’ve lived in, is in the suburbs, the orderly suburbs, where things are mostly the same day over day. We park in our own driveways, in the paved sea of white hatched spaces that surround every building, in our assigned places. I swing wide and park my big car haphazardly, pull through so I’m facing out if I have the chance. I grew up this way: in suburb after suburb. High speed roads with raised sidewalks.

The bicycles take up a lane and we give them wide berth because we can afford to. In the suburbs, I don’t need a purse because I lug my car, the biggest purse. I have my yoga mat, my water bottle, chewing gum, sunglasses. I have a first aid kit, a tire pump, a picnic blanket, some tote bags for shopping that I rarely remember to pull from the trunk when I go to buy my milk and bananas, my large bags of onions and potatoes.

My sons too, have lived always in suburbs, always in places populated enough that we can walk: to the market, to the post office, the library, the swimming pool. Sometimes I coaxed them out with an ice cream cone, the promise of a slurpee. Sometimes there’s a mangy fox roaming the backyards, sometimes a dog stares from a photo taped to a light pole. LOST.

We find things. We turn on little paths around playgrounds and find ourselves in new neighborhoods, sometimes someone has left a shoe, or a hat. Sometimes there’s a dead bird on the sidewalk, sometimes the rain coaxes out earthworms who are flattened into Ss on the sidewalk. Once we found a little graveyard, tucked between some houses and the baseball field.

Today our free write was: What was the landscape of your childhood?

Our poem was “Service” by Zeina Hashem Beck, from her book To Live In Autumn.

And we also read a little bit of this crown of sonnets, “Poem Beginning & Ending with My Birth” also by Beck. The Rhyme scheme: ABBA ABBA CDE CDE last line becomes the first line of the next sonnet.

And the prompt: “In ___________[city you live in]…” list one custom of the place you live and then go for thirteen more lines. Then repeat that 14th line to make it the first line for another 14.

Good luck pals. See you next week.