I have a new love for my ’hood
I’d felt trapped in suburbia long before lockdown began, so when the news broke that we’d be confined to our own neighbourhoods for four weeks at least, I was anticipating a month of steadily going insane. With its comfortable cookie-cutter houses, the outlying East Auckland suburb I live in, largely for financial reasons, feels like a cut-price Kiwi version of Stepford, Connecticut, from The Stepford Wives.
I appreciate it can be a great place to live for the elderly, young families priced out of central Auckland, and those who like to spend their spare time gardening, moseying around hardware shops for the tools for their next home DIY project, and wandering around the mall.
For a single 30-something who enjoys none of these things though, life can get pretty dull.
In the good old, pre-lockdown days, I’d spend as little of my precious weekend time in the neighbourhood as possible, preferring to head to the beach, wilderness or a suburb with a bit more to do.
Then the clock ticked midnight on March 26 and my feelings for the neighbourhood changed.
Not having to spend two to three hours a day in traffic had a lot to do with it. But it wasn’t just that – the suburb itself had come to life. And I was suddenly seeing it in a very different light.
With little, if anything, that you need within walking distance, the suburb was not what you would call pedestrian friendly. And cyclists, I’m sure, took their lives in their handlebars when they hit the traffic-clogged streets. If it weren’t for all the cars, you might have assumed large sections of the suburb had been deserted.
I rarely saw my neighbours or a familiar face in the reserve behind my house.
Now we’re all stuck here though, it seems we’re finally making the most of our communal backyard. And, in my case at least, finally learning to appreciate it.
Suddenly full of walkers, joggers, cyclists, and families getting some fresh air together (at an appropriate social distance), I now see that the reserve has an understated natural beauty. It may lack the rugged good looks of the West Coast or the striking beauty of the coastal communities up north but, with its meandering, native bush-backed river, mini waterfall and tall deciduous trees transitioning to their flamboyant autumn wardrobes, it is peaceful and pleasant in a safe, familiar way.
Its suburban feel is now a comfort.
With nowhere to rush off to, I am spending much more time at the reserve, savouring the morning reality show that is the sunrise on solitary pre-work runs, doing my best not to scare the odd person I pass with huffing and puffing, which might sound like a respiratory issue, and getting my daily dose of real-life human contact on afternoon walks – at a safe, two-metre-plus distance, of course.
The number of familiar faces is increasing by the day, and the solidarity my neighbours are showing in this chaotic time by smiling, waving and stopping to chat with those they pass is heartening indeed. It finally feels like a real neighbourhood. If, with the lack of cars and clusters of nuclear families, a bit like one from the 1950s.
With the beautiful, blue-sky weather over the weekend, the local beaches I ran along seemed positively idyllic.
They’re just small city beaches – certainly no Anchor Bay, Tawharanui or Piha – but, with temporarily stilled boats bobbing in clear, blue water and atypically uncrowded stretches of sand, they possess, like the reserve, a low-key allure.
They have a wide, open-spaced wholesomeness that makes me grateful I’m no longer in London.
Being confined to my old Peckham flat where I shared a barred-windowed bedroom with a boiler that spluttered like a Covid-19 sufferer, would definitely have sent me mad.
As would have spending four weeks in close quarters with a flatmate who liked to think out loud. And only having same-old, same-old terraced housing on streets that showed few outward signs of their reported gentrification to run past – more often than not under a leaden sky.
Of course, it’s hard not to be struck by the incongruity between the apparent calm of our newly quiet Earth and the chaos wrought by the virus that has caused it.
I keep finding myself picturing how my neighbourhood might look if we were no longer able to keep up appearances.
If we weren’t able to shop for DIY supplies or call in tradespeople for months, and things began to go to rack and ruin.
It would look, I imagine, much as many ghost towns do now, being slowly but surely eaten away by the elements and foliage that surrounds them.
It’s a nightmare scenario far worse than the Stepford Wives, which will most likely never come to pass.
Still, it reminds me I shouldn’t take my newly peaceful yet alive neighbourhood for granted. Things could be far worse.