Arriving

If you pinpoint Wheaton, Illinois, on a map, you’ll find a suburban community about 25 miles due west of downtown Chicago. One of many towns now subsumed into the greater Chicago metropolitan area, Wheaton has the distinction of being the childhood home of my amazing wife, Ella.

This town perfectly encapsulates the trend toward suburbanization so common across this nation—a once-picturesque rural village with a railroad depot and cobblestone main street has burgeoned into but one section of a continuous sprawling quilt of buildings, roads, shopping centers, and neighborhoods radiating out from the city center, in this case the Windy City. While the scale of metropolitan areas varies, we’ve observed the same “people quilt” in so many other places: Northern Virginia, Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, New York, and on and on.

When Alexander and Ellen Palmgren, my future in-laws, arrived in Wheaton with their three young daughters in January 1977, it was on one of the coldest days in Illinois’ history (26 degrees below zero). The picture attached to this post captures that day, the moving truck backed up to the garage, a fuzzy image prompting even fuzzier memories from the eldest, Ella, four years old at the time. “Freezing cold, lots of snow … I sat in the back of the station wagon next to one of my sisters riding in a port-a-crib as the Buick slid around the icy roads.”

“I think our furniture finally warmed up around Easter!” quips my father-in-law. Needless to say, the family survived their Arctic-level sojourn. The parsonage where they made their home sat across a gravel parking lot from the small but growing church, both situated a quarter mile south of the Arrowhead housing development. Much of the surrounding land was still corn fields, and farms still dotted the surrounding environs. From this vantage point, the Palmgren family enjoyed a twenty-year window to witness and live the transition from town to suburb.

This suburbanization is the opposite of what I wrote about in Dryland Lament, stories of those living in a rural place that was de-peopling. Ella and I share much in common, but we spent many decades of married life learning how our respective childhoods and environs shaped us differently. My history was one of people moving away. Her childhood story epitomized growth; hers was a place where people arrived. Regardless of environment, we both learned to respect those around us and appreciate their stories.

This then, with Ella’s help, will be our task for the next few weeks, to consider the places in America that have known growth, vitality, and change. No change is without costs and benefits. What was lost in these suburbs? What was gained? I do not intend to write overt glorifications* of the past, but fair warning, at times whiffs of nostalgia will inevitably waft from these musings. I make no apologies for acknowledging the value, and (sometimes) superiority of “the way things were.”

* – I started with the word “paean” but since we don’t normally think in terms of Greek poems or songs of praise and triumph, let’s go with “glorification.”