Ebb and Flow
Pick any US suburban neighborhood and, like the ocean, it has its rhythm, its ebb and flow. Drawn not from a satellite’s pull, it is drawn by the clock, started over a century ago, and its chime announcing the start of yet another workday.
Stepping smartly, or drowsily, from their private overnight routines, they look alternately disheveled, or coiffed, some beginning their workday even before stepping to their vehicles for yet another drive “in”. Few look happy — few look enamored with the ideas, and responsibilities their occupations, their careers, their choices, bring them.
But all empty the neighborhoods like an ebbing tide — leaving the sunset to rise on a minority with a later beginning to this rhythm, but leave they must. Their private lives, their overnight, daily, and even weekend routines demand the ebb and flow of another master, of another schedule, of another role.
The neighborhood will be still by 9am — just in time for those who work on the opposite side of this daytime ebb and flow to begin their own “overnight” private routines.
Then those of us without a workday routine will have the neighborhood to ourselves — to our own new routines…our own ebb and flow of living…in any US suburban neighborhood.