Reston

I wanted to talk to Katherine on the phone but it was late and I couldn’t reach her. I didn’t want to talk in my parents’ house, where I was visiting for Thanksgiving, so I grabbed my phone, got into my mom’s car and drove. I drove to the south side of Reston, which is the older side, or at least the side on which fewer new development is occurring. It is also the older side of Reston as far as my own life history is concerned. I grew up on this side of the Dulles Access road, in a neighborhood called Boston Ridge, in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac.

I crossed the Access road and turned left on Sunrise Valley Drive and as I approached Boston Ridge, I decided to turn in. It was dark. There aren’t that many streetlights in Reston. Boston Ridge was built in the late 1970s in the middle of old forest and the place is still thick with trees. It was late November and the road was strewn with dead leaves which clumped in piles in the gutters where cars had scattered them.

I pulled up in front of our house, which, of course seemed small to me now. I sat there and looked at it for probably less than three minutes, enough time to notice the same brass pineapple doorknocker which I remembered from childhood, which I remember using occasionally but mainly when hoisted to its height in the arms of my mom or dad. We moved out of this house when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I think at some point I had been back to this neighborhood since then, but I don’t remember it.

I pulled out of the parking space and spent a few minutes looking around, seeking with the headlights of the car a playground which had been, as I recalled it, hidden in the woods nearby. I could not find it. The trees were thicker than I remembered but everything else was diminished. The hills and rises—the gradient of the land—which seemed so troublesome to a kid on a bike now seemed insignificant.

I didn’t feel any sadness or nostalgia indulging in this sudden trip down memory lane. Perhaps it was the darkness. Boston Ridge was familiar to me in sunlight; when you’re a kid you don’t go out after dark. Viewed through the headlights of my mom's Volvo, the neighborhood looked familiar but in a somewhat generic way. Piles of leaves and bare trees, moreover, are intrinsically nostalgic anyway. Winter is just evocative for some reason; perhaps it's the attendant notion of death.

I drove on to the Langston Hughes Middle School where I went for seventh and eighth grades, and South Lakes High School, where I went for ninth and tenth before I convinced my parents—through unabashed pleading—to transfer me to Interlochen and thereby save my soul.

Or whatever. I did feel something as I sat in the parking lot in front of South Lakes and it was a profound sense of regret. What a privilege it is to be young, I thought, and relatively innocent. But I spent much of that youth being unduly hard on myself and on those around me. I was always looking for the next thing, the thing that I did not have, as though unattainability was itself a virtue. I’ve never been one to linger and I didn’t linger that night. The school is currently undergoing a major renovation and there were trailers and construction equipment everywhere. But I didn’t stop to look around. I didn’t even get out of the car.