Two Years on Greenbrook Way | Andokides' Porch

This essay began as "Six Months on Greenbrook Way.” Then, it was “A Year on Greenbrook Way.” Now, it’s “Two Years on Greenbrook Way.” In some respects, I’m happy for the delay. While most of my observations at six months have stood the test of time, I’ve had occasion to revise some assessments in significant ways. At the six-month mark, our new refrigerator sent me an email — yes, our refrigerator — reminding me that it was time to change its filters. At the one-year mark, that refrigerator broke down, exactly 367 days after being placed into service. The bamboo, which we had plowed under when we moved in, is beginning its spring sprouting, but not the thick, woody culps that pushed up last spring. This spring’s sprouts are tender, grassy green shoots. The strength of the root system is being slowly starved, but this is a multi-year campaign. Happily, the bamboo goes on the offensive only for a few weeks each year. The strategy is to play the long game.

In the meantime, we (Bill, really) did some landscaping/planting in the front yard last year and some in a bed adjacent to the house in the back. We miscalculated the amount of sun in some locations, and we lost some plants when the temperature fell to around 9º Fahrenheit this winter. That happens in Atlanta only about once a decade, at least it used to be once a decade. Our losses notwithstanding, we have some plants budding out for their second season. Though it’s only the end of February, our hyacinth and daffodils are in bloom. Around the neighborhood, cherry trees, Japanese magnolia, redbud, and Bradford pear trees present brumes of white, pink, and purple. Forsythia provide bright yellow exclamation points, while azaleas and dogwood wait in the wings. I’ve always told people who’ve never been in the American Southeast in the spring that the experience is like Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland. It's a bit early for all this, even for Atlanta, and we’ve already broken 80º a couple of times. It may be a brief efflorescence.

Our house is just inside the freeway that circles Atlanta, “the Perimeter”; we are “itp” in the local patois. The freeway exit is typical: a no-place, a collision of drive-thru eateries, gas stations, and chain stores. There’s a del Taco, a Checkers, a Chick-fil-a, a Target. Unlike older cities, which were laid out like quilts, each neighborhood a self-sufficient unit, Atlanta is laid out like a pie, each slice attached to a shopping mall on the Perimeter. Most of those malls, which had their glory days in the late 60s and early 70s, have failed or are failing. The mall less than a mile from our house was once one of Atlanta’s largest and most interesting, with four anchor stores. Today, Emory University Healthcare is taking over one end, the space that was Parisian, later Kohl’s, while a struggling Macy’s holds down the other end. Much of it is vacant.

As was the case with most big malls , Northlake spawned a cluster of satellite strip malls, some of which are thriving, some gasping for breath, all of them a little threadbare.

So, it’s a bit of a shock, even after two years, to turn off a busy secondary artery into a sylvan, green neighborhood of tall old-growth trees and thoughtfully landscaped yards. It’s akin to slipping through a portal into a secret garden.

The neighborhood appears, on the surface, quiet, and it mostly is, but if you could turn up the volume on that picture, there is, during the day at least, an almost constant buzz of lawnmowers, and string trimmers, and leaf blowers, and chain saws. On the weekends, it’s the do-it-yourselfers. First thing Monday mornings, the weekend warriors are replaced by an army of landscape services, mobile pet groomers, tree services, painters, plumbers, pest control crews, electricians, roofers, gutter and window installers. We believe in maintenance in Randolph Estates.

Front yards are mostly well groomed and nicely planted — It’s not surprising that there’s a garden club — but not fussy. People grow vegetables in their front yards, build wire cages to protect vegetables and fruit trees from animals, and park basketball backboards curbside for street play. (In two years, I’ve witnessed those nets in use three times. The basketball backboards notwithstanding, soccer is the sport of choice in the neighborhood, and soccer goals in front yards outnumber basketball backboards.) Fisher-Price and Playskool play sets and even lawn furniture can be seen on the lawns in front of houses.

Unlike my previous neighborhood, which was a front-porch neighborhood — houses built with capacious “sittin’ porches” that could accommodate a swing and several rockers or some wicker chairs where residents could sit and greet neighbors passing by, perhaps even invite someone to come "sit a spell” and enjoy a glass of cold ice tea or Coca-Cola, catch up on the local gossip — Randolph Estates/Greenwood Acres is, architecturally, a backyard neighborhood. In the 60s, when this neighborhood was developed, people socialized on their back patios, grilled steaks and served up cocktails privately, out of the sight of neighbors. They waved to neighbors from their automobiles as they headed out to or returned from work or errands.

But despite the architecture and infrastructure, our new neighborhood is, socially, a return to front-porch fellowship. People walk. The neighborhood was conceived during the peak years of automobile culture in the US. There are no sidewalks, but people walk. They walk by themselves; they walk with their spouses; they walk with dogs; they walk with strollers; they walk with dogs and strollers and spouses. Whole families walk. And when out walking, people stop along the way to chat with neighbors working in their yards or sitting in lawn chairs set out as if facing a parade route.

Walking for exercise, though, is one thing, perfectly acceptable even in the best neighborhoods. Walking for purposes beyond exercise — to walk to the grocery store or to the Post Office, say — well that is something quite different. Walking for exercise highlights leisure, the luxury of time spent on non-essentials. Walking to the grocery, on the other hand, might suggest a paucity of means: "Well, I hear they can’t afford a second car, so when he’s at work, what else is she to do?” That would certainly have been the thinking in the 1960s, and even today, Americans think nothing of jumping into the car for even very short errands. In our new neighborhood, though, it’s not uncommon to see people walking home with a couple of grocery bags or setting out on foot to the nearby FedEx carrying a small package or two. Undoubtedly, this shift in attitude is more generational than geographical, but, aside from dense urban centers where walking has always been woven into the fabric of daily life, I have never lived in a neighborhood in which this perambulatory embrace was so concentrated.

A telling detail that, in its insignificance, powerfully conjures the 1960s: We have a phone jack (look it up, Xers!) on our back patio. I have no trouble imagining Mrs Robinson taking a call while juggling a martini and a cigarette in her free hand. Many of the residents are original owners or close seconds. Some of these older residents are surviving spouses. We’re the second residents of our house, the second owners excepting the guy who bought it, slapped some lipstick on it, and sold it to us. Alongside the original settlers, there is also a significant contingent of younger couples with children, gradually replacing the long-timers. Our new neighbors are overwhelmingly white, though there is a handful of black families and a few Asian families.

There is no shortage of irony here if one but looks. On a recent walk, I passed a house with lawn bags of pine straw set out at the curb for pick up. Five doors down, someone was paying for bales of pine straw to be delivered for distribution as mulch on flower beds. It’s a neighborhood where white people post Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards, perhaps for the benefit of the maybe half dozen black households. The people who live here, at least the younger people, have chosen to live in the city (When the older residents settled in, this would have been quite suburban.). In the spring of our first year, the yard signs congratulating graduates seemed to suggest that integration into the city ended at the schoolhouse door. The number of private schools represented was astonishing. But this past spring, public schools were heavily represented.

The neighborhood is far from politically homogeneous: there are the Black Lives Matter signs and credos affirming the reality of science and the equivalence of love in all its forms and configurations; there is a smattering of gay pride flags. Subarus and electric and hybrid electric vehicles are over-represented, relative to the population at large. But on a trash pick-up morning early in our time here, I took a casual survey of the roughly 130 homes along my two-mile walking route. Only about 40% of households had recycling bins set out. There is a greater number of American flags on permanent display than in any neighborhood I’ve ever lived in, about 13% of houses. While there is no necessary correlation between the American flag and political ideology, at least since the 1950s, the political right has sought to wrap itself in the flag while brandishing the cross like a weapon, and Tom Wolfe, in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, observed that the political left of the 60s surrendered the symbolic power of the flag by degrading it at every turn. Remember flag burnings and flag patches worn upside down on the butts of jeans? And a flag displayed all the time is a different symbol than a flag unfurled for the 4th of July, Memorial Day, and other days of commemoration.

The flag-waving, non-recycling, likely Republican households are almost evenly matched by the “Black Lives Matter,” Subaru-driving, presumptively Democratic households, the vast majority of us, about three quarters, keeping our politics mostly to ourselves in the interest of comity. In an earlier iteration of this essay, I wondered if our happy co-existence might be challenged in the very contentious election in 2022, an election in which our current governor, a Republican, after fending off a primary challenge from the right, faced a rematch with Stacy Abrams, whom he narrowly defeated in 2018, an election in which he was both a candidate and the state’s top elections official. In fact, it was the contest for a US Senate seat between Raphael Warnock and Hershel Walker that generated far more sound and fury. The only campaign signs I saw in the neighborhood were for Warnock or Abrams, the vast majority for Warnock. At the time, I wondered if meetings of the Randolph Estates Garden Club and the Greenwood Acres Civic Association would see unaccustomed tensions, divisions over issues bigger than what weekend to choose for the annual neighborhood yard sale or what colors to use when freshening up the signage at the neighborhood entrances. In a country where political integration in neighborhoods is no longer the norm, where zip codes are increasingly politically homogenous, our new ‘hood is an anomaly, and it has been interesting to see, in these fractious times, neighbors of different political persuasions, if not working through their divisions, at least setting them aside in pursuit of the things we hold in common.

But for now, I’m loving where we live. It lacks some of the grit of urban living that I’ve become accustomed to, and I don’t feel as integrated into the fabric of the city as when I lived in East Point; I’ve been on mass transit maybe four times in the past two years. Multiple trips a day on MARTA used to my norm. I no longer know what restaurants are hot; there’s a certain energy that’s absent, but that’s OK. We still have fairly ready access to what the city has to offer — the symphony, the museums, the theaters, the restaurants — without having to endure the ugliness, the noise, and the tension of life in the center of the city.

So, we’ve come twice full circle on the calendar. We can now begin to observe the patterns, the annual cycles, of life here. Annual cycles are about the longest that most of us can reasonably observe. Most of us will live for only seven to nine decades, and at either end of that, we’re likely not really competent observers, not a substantial enough data set to establish the patterns over decades. Historians may observe the cycles of centuries, but for most of us, annual cycles are the greatest we can apprehend.

The azaleas blooming now are the same that bloomed last year. I can already anticipate the black calla lilies at Chris and Sarah’s mailbox this summer and even the gorgeous flame of the maple tree across the street next fall. There will be changes within the cycles, for sure: Nancy, three doors down, will graduate from being wheeled around the neighborhood in her wagon to riding around on her bicycle; some of the older residents will die or move into assisted living; new people will move in. But those changes will be incremental, like the progression of a Phillip Glass composition. The regularity will come to define life here. So, now, I’m looking forward to the leafing of our maples, evenings sitting on the patio, and maybe a fire or two in the firepit in the brief time when it’s not too cold or too hot. Y’all are invited to join us anytime.