

My neighborhood is what you might call a “housing development.” Not a planned community, or a gated community or a condominium development, but a housing development. The houses themselves are all relatively large. The streets all come in loops off of a single straight road running down the middle. There are no lane dividers and plenty of stop signs to keep people from racing through. It's obviously meant to be a quiet neighborhood. Everyone has a big front yard to set their house back from the road, and plenty of trees. All of the yards are nicely landscaped and well-kempt. 50 years ago this was one of the nicest neighborhoods around. This was where all the doctors and lawyers lived. Must have been convenient, since it's right by the local hospital. It's still nice, but they built an even nicer one next door, with even bigger houses. The problem with that development is that all those houses look exactly the same, and so do their yards. You can tell the houses in this neighborhood were built from a limited number of plans, but they all have enough differences that you can tell them apart. It's really the landscaping that makes the difference, though. Everyone's has its own unique style. There are all kinds of beautiful flowering shrubs and trees growing, and some people go all out with perennial flowers. Some of the houses look like they're in the middle of the woods, though it's obviously made that way on purpose, while others appear to be at the top of a tall hill of grass. Each truly is a unique creation. 

There is a nice little park in the middle, but no stores anywhere. The park has a volleyball court, a baseball field, tennis courts, and a playground for kids, basketball court, as well a pretty big open field and a little bit of woods on the outskirts. There are multiple entrances to the park. The main one is from the road, there's a decent-sized parking lot for when the park hosts little-league games. The other entrances sort of cut through people's yards, but nobody seems to care. We're decidedly the suburbs. Our neighborhood sort of exists as its own entity, but within a larger area of similar developments. The outer bounds of this greater area are the Main Street of our town, on one side, and the other main street, Broad Street, which runs perpendicular, on the next side. The other two sides are bounded by a fairly busy, numbered state road that sort of curves around us. It's a fairly long walk to any of these borders, though, around 20-30 minutes depending on which one you're going to. Broad street is probably the closest, that's where the hospital is. On main street it's all houses this side, except for a couple of Catholic schools and a Catholic nursing home. Oh, and a church, of course, complete with a little graveyard. Like I said, it's a quiet neighborhood.

