(no subject)

[enamoured]

Before we moved, my mom always wanted a new house. The neighborhood we lived in had been quiet and quaint when my parents moved in before my brother and I were born, but as time passed, they built low-income apartments across the street from our house. The treeline by our lawn was literally a barrier between the projects and the 'burbs. Things were going bad in the neighborhood. There was this clump of trees across the street from my house and people used to sell drugs over there. Our dog pointed my dad to a gun in our backyard once. And one of my cousin's friends got shot at the basketball courts by the apartments that I could see from my old bedroom. Sometimes I could hear gunshots really late at night.

It wasn't that bad, really. I never felt particularly threatened, mostly because actually witnessing some of those things happening was rare. My brother and I played in the front and back yards all the time and everything. And we had our other friends at our school, so we didn't really hang out around the neighborhood that much. But, you know, when you're a kid, the bad things about your life don't hit you until they get pointed out.

But anyway: my mom wanted a new house long before we moved. Sometimes when she was off (and my mom worked a lot when I was much younger, more than she works now, and I think that explains why I used to be reluctant to talk to her or whatever, because she wasn't around and why should I tell things to someone who never is home?) and she'd pick my brother and I up from school, we would just go driving around the city, and sometimes we'd go driving through neighborhoods, looking at houses. There was one neighborhood near my grandma's house that we loved to death--the houses were all fairly new, and they were gorgeous and always had fliers with pictures and descriptions of the rooms on them. Sometimes, the realators would leave the houses open during the day. I don't know why they did this, especially because most of the houses were done being built and were probably set to go on the market. But we would always get out the car and walk through the houses, oohing and aahing and dreaming for something else. Even me, though I loved our house to death. And I did love that house--I loved how the heating system would make this humming noise before it came on during the winter, and I loved our big backyard and pretty much everything about it. Even though our house was older and battered in places, it was home and I loved it, but I did like walking through these other houses and imagining what life would be like in them.

Last night we did something like that: we went up the street from our neighborhood and just looked at most of the houses, because here the realators and builders put locks on most of the doors. Some of the houses we went in were still being worked on, so they weren't locked and we got to wander around some. The house we live in now is okay, and it's not as old as the one we used to live in, but it's too small and my mom still wants something a little bigger, something with a huge back yard like the one at our old house, even though my brother and I are too old for a swingset and everything. And even though I don't particularly like living here that much and would gladly go back to North Carolina in a minute, I found myself walking through those houses and wondering how things would be different if I lived there.

That really had no point. But: anyone else ever do that? Or is it just my family?

Comments

[morgana44.livejournal.com]

Ever since I can remember we've done something similar. Like I remember going to the grocery store with my mom when I was real little and we'd ride through the uber nice neighborhood nearby and look at the houses. When we go out to dinner as a family, sometimes driving back to the house we'd detour through other neighborhoods just to see what houses were up. Even now, I'll find myself driving through neighborhoods when I need to think or get away. It's not like we were always looking to move, (even though we've moved 7 times that I can remember) but it was just looking and thinking of something better. Your old neighborhood reminds me of the house I lived in longest. It was a nice, but old neighborhood, and they built an apartment complex less than a block away. It became sort of a game for us to count the number of police helicopters that would fly over in one night. And like you said, my neighborhood wasn't really all that dangerous for us, the "bad part" was just there. I dunno...

...I enjoyed reading this though! :)

[mzspearz.livejournal.com]

My dad's a realtor.

I think I've seen more houses than like...clothes or something. LOL