Garage Door in a Suburban Neighborhood

The little burb is a middle-class neighborhood where the lawns are green, the facades are uniform, and the driveways are filled with family sedans and soccer-mom minivans. A neighborhood in which toe-headed children run up and down the street, howling, and fathers push strollers filled with pink-faced infants, wrapped in blue blankets. Dacmen Avenue, lined with barely varying garage doors shimmers green in the spring and summer, gold and brown in the fall, and settles down with a grey haze for winter.

 The pinkish house near the end of the block has a yellow garage door to match the bent, yellow hula hoop stuck in the big magnolia tree out front. In previous years, a home characterized by chalk art on the cement and rollerblades on the front walk, more recently by a bike left out and lights left on all night. There’s still a stack of old skates on the front porch rack, underneath the new layer of softball gloves and ping pong paddles. In the back there lives a knobby fig tree, fragrant in July, who loses her leaves and becomes and intimidating old hag in December.

This is a typical neighborhood, with typical home and very normal families. Little boxes on a hillside, little boxes full of ticky tacky. It's the definition of suburbia, seemingly all the same. But just one block over, zoning and ordinance rules change and suddenly there is a little bit of creativity, expression.

But things can be spiced up with a little originality. The house across the street from the hula hoop house has frosted windows on its garage door, a sleek futuristic metallic look. A house down the street has a front garden like a lush jungle, all pops of color and winding mosaic fences. There is room for expression here, and room for improvement.