On green grass

It's right under your feet

If you have a regular commute, eventually, you get to know all the homes along the route. On the drive to drop my older son off at Kindergarten, I drive past one especially gorgeous house every day. The contemporary custom stucco with a winding driveway backs up to the golf course, echoing the greens with its perfect yard.

Sometimes, when surrounded by the constant babbling of my children or the mind-numbing repetition of their children's music, I'll daydream about the people who live in that house.

I bet they have a lawn service - maybe even a crew for shoveling snow (or the height of luxury - a heated driveway). I imagine the Mom; she's probably a successful professional, like a lawyer or a doctor. She steps out onto her snow-free driveway in her designer pumps and gets in her (probably clean) luxury sedan. I bet she's not screaming at her well-behaved kids to find their damn shoes. She drops them off with plenty of time to spare to get to her high-paying job, where she then eats a healthy lunch and heads off to do something like pilates or yoga.

Photo by The Nix Company on Unsplash

That stucco house is the home of someone who has her life together. I bet she's happy.

Once I drop off my son at Kindergarten, probably late, I turn back to see the house once more on my way back to my own.

You can't miss me - my dirty truck has leftover hay in the bed, and the cab is coated with mud and the sticky sheen of finally allowing my kids to eat in the car when I swore I never would. I'm probably wearing leggings, a hoodie, muck boots, and a sloppy bun. If lucky, I'll have a few minutes to shovel food into my mouth like a starving raccoon on a trash pile.

I'll then return to our vintage-yellow 1970s tri-level and look at the driveway, which has accumulated a layer of pine needles so thick it’s starting its own tiny ecosystem. I'll clean it off someday, but not today. Between zoom meetings and work, my workout will be throwing a fifty-pound hay bale over the 6-foot fence.

I'll turn around in the afternoon and do the Kindergarten commute again, wondering what the woman with the beautiful house is doing at that very moment - probably something smart and fashionable - like afternoon Prosecco with her book club. I'll look down at my hoodie and probably find an errant egg I grabbed from the nesting box and forgot about in my pocket. Bonus points if it's not broken.

Our neighborhood is odd. It's a big square of four-to-ten-acre primarily 70s and 80s homes, zoned for small agriculture, surrounded by standard suburbia. We keep goats and chickens in the shadow of a Starbucks, Popeye's, In-N-Out, an outlet mall, and houses in varying shades of HOA-beige - stretching on for miles.

Photo by CARTER SAUNDERS on Unsplash

When I met my husband, Mark, he lived in one of those beige houses less than two miles from our current little urban farm. Now, on Sundays, we drive past his old house. He inevitably declares that the new owners still haven't ever repainted it, probably because he paid extra for the nice paint when he had it done almost two decades ago.

Mark has lived a lot of life since he sprung for the expensive paint on that house. He's bought three and sold two homes. We dated, broke up once for about 48 hours, dated again, got engaged, married, and had two boys. We've fought and made up, laughed and cried, faced heartbreaking deaths and new life. He's had three jobs, four trucks, and been to the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. He's hunted, fished, chased big dreams, and given up on others.

I'm sure that sometimes, on Sundays, when we drive past his old house with the nice paint and now-maturing landscaping that he planted back when his knees let him do things like that, the time he spent there feels like a lifetime ago.

Sometimes, though, he'll tell me about his morning commute from those days. Mark used to work in construction with his brother. There were early mornings and late nights when they managed crews of men doing hard and dirty but noble work. He was tired when he left and even more tired when he got home.

But, since he took the same route every day to work, Mark eventually got to know all the homes on his way to the yard. Every morning, he would turn on Washington and see the one neighborhood filled with those out-of-place houses. They were mostly a little older - 70s and 80s - situated on four-to-ten-acre parcels. He saw they had horses, barns, goats, and chickens. It was like a tiny Luxembourg of throwback agriculture surrounded by ever-multiplying suburbia.

On his way in, Mark would imagine the lives of the people in that neighborhood. They were living the dream — acreage and a little agriculture close enough for a reasonable commute. The people in those houses weren't shoehorned in the way he was. They had the space to do big and fun things.

Mark would drive past a weird vintage-yellow 1970s tri-level and wonder about the people inside. He looked at the giant beautiful pine trees out front. Mark was sure the people who got to step out onto that driveway to their trucks parked under those trees every morning had it all. He bet they were happy.

So, tomorrow morning, when I drop the older boy off at Kindergarten and drive past the stunning stucco house, I'll come home to park my dirty truck under the big pine trees. And I'll be happy.