I came of age on the edge of suburbia, where cookie-cutter housing projects end and the surrounding countryside begins. Decades later, again I find myself perched on the edge, further west than when I was young but still at the very end of one little patch of suburban sprawl.
Today, lost in the wind-whipped fog, I set out into the cold to briefly inspect this misty borderland. On one side of the development highly manicured lawns and a stillborn sidewalk abruptly end at the property line. Beyond lies a jumbled landscape of broken concrete, cast-off construction material, and untamed weeds. On another side the road ends with a warning, the skeletal outline of a copse of trees fading out into the fog.
Wow. Striking.
(The German in me wonders why people don’t clean up where they will be looking at every day.)