There’s something special about summer in the suburbs. As someone who generally hates the scorching hot temperatures of summers in the American South, it may sound weird for me to confess that this week—the week leading up to the Fourth of July—is one of my favorite weeks of the whole year.
I don’t know how to best describe it, but I guess I’ll just put it this way: walking the streets of a suburban neighborhood with 90 degrees of summer heat reflecting off the sidewalks evokes feelings of home like only my childhood house can. These days, it’s my own neighborhood that makes me feel this way—my love for summer in the suburbs is not tied to one location in particular so much as it is the locational genre of “suburbs.”
When I take a walk around my neighborhood on a summer day like today, preferably around lunchtime, there’s a sort of blazing sleepiness to it that just feels some kind of magical. Few people are around. Occasional sounds of splashes in pools and flips on trampolines can be heard, but in a neighborhood with more high schoolers than not, the neighborhood is still pretty quiet amidst the midday heat.
I recently heard someone describe suburbs as “The Backrooms of society,” and it immediately clicked with me. And that’s when I realized I’m in love with liminal spaces.
An Aesthetic That Evokes Nostalgia
Lately I’ve come across a lot of people on TikTok and other internet platforms reveling in an aesthetic best defined as “liminal spaces.” Simply speaking, a liminal space is just a time or space of transition. A liminal space could be the summer between your senior year of high school and your first year in college, or it could be a hallway connecting the rooms in your house.
Aesthetics Wiki describes liminal spaces like this, “Typically these are abandoned, and oftentimes empty - a mall at 4am or a school hallway during summer, for example. This makes it feel frozen and slightly unsettling, but also familiar to our minds.” When people feel creeped out by liminal spaces, they will sometimes be referred to as The Backrooms, but many who love the liminal spaces aesthetic often refer to liminal spaces as a whole as The Backrooms, even if they aren’t creeped out by them.
One example of a liminal space that you may have experienced is being in a school outside of school hours. I experienced this recently, actually, when we went to a swim meet for some students in the youth group. We walked through a portion of the high school—it wasn’t even my high school—and I was hit with waves of good, slightly odd, feelings that could best be described as anxious nostalgia. Appropriate given my high school experience.
Another common liminal space is an airport in the middle of the night or super early in the morning. Another is an empty office or a mall with very few stores in it near closing time.
You get the idea.
A lot of people have adapted this aesthetic into a sort of horror aesthetic, which isn’t my thing at all. But I have also heard or seen someone describe liminal spaces/The Backrooms as places that feel vaguely familiar and feel like the settings of dreams. They feel real, or like you’ve been there before, but you can’t quite place when or how. This particular description resonates with me.
And I think that’s why it makes sense that someone would describe the suburbs as liminal spaces. I suppose technically they are, sort of, in that they are transitions from urban to rural areas. But also suburbs all generally feel pretty similar, at least in the United States. So if you’re like me and you grew up in the suburbs in the Midwest and now you live in suburbs in the South, you sort of feel like this is all familiar, even if it is still a bit new.
Back to the ‘Burbs
I think my love for summer in the suburbs is rooted not in my own childhood experiences, but a job experience I had in college.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I continued working for the mom-and-pop pizza place I worked at in high school, but at a new location on the other side of town. I was the primary dayshift waiter—a position I requested even though it paid less so that I could spend the evenings with my friends.1
This location of the pizza shop was new, so the managers asked for a volunteer to walk around nearby neighborhoods during the day and “door-hang,” which consisted of dropping off takeout menus and coupons on people’s doorsteps (no knocking or ringing or explicit soliciting required). I volunteered because I mean why not? I got paid something like $8 an hour to walk around neighborhoods and listen to my iPod instead of $5 to stand around and fold boxes or prep food waiting for tables to come into the new storefront.
I’m not sure how many days I walked around the neighborhoods of northwest Fort Wayne putting menus and coupons on doorsteps, but it was at least three weeks of my summer if I had to bet.
And it was three of the best weeks of my life.
After a couple of days of parking my car and walking around the midday heat in my restaurant-issued black t-shirt and being sort of miserable, I decided that if I was going to do this Sisyphean task, I was going to do it well and enjoy myself while I did it. So I dug the old Razor scooter I got for my tenth birthday out of my parents’ garage and decided to ride it from house to house instead of walking around like a chump.
On top of that, I started listening to sermons…A LOT of sermons. Right before that summer—after a long process of resisting a call to ministry and being harangued about it by some friends—I changed my major to biblical literature and was diving into Christian thinkers and preachers around the world in earnest for the first time. In the summer of 2010 I probably listened to every sermon Matt Chandler and Mark Driscoll had on the internet. I didn’t like listening to Driscoll very much—he was too abrasive for me even then—but Chandler was exactly the kind of preacher I wanted to be if I ever became one. When I got bored of sermons or ran out of the ones I downloaded onto my iPod, I switched over to Owl City’s Maybe I’m Dreaming album, which was my summer soundtrack in that season (and still is today).
I fell in love with door-hanging once I made it more efficient, productive, and fun. And I started to see how many houses I could hit in a day while also wanting the chore to not end any sooner than it had to—I was just enjoying myself so much.
So that’s where my love for summers in the suburbs is rooted. Every summer when I walk around our neighborhood I’m reminded of the magic.
For me, summer peaks at Fourth of July, and its in the waning weeks of July and the beginning of August that I become sick of the heat and ready for cozy, fall football Saturdays.
But then, unfortunately, another sort of liminal space sets in. One that feels much more like the creepy Backrooms people describe online. The blazing transitory time between Independence Day and Labor Day weekend is excruciating. Last year I think I actually developed a form of seasonal depression during that period.
Summer in the suburbs is unmatched, even if it overstays its welcome.
Being a dayshift waiter at a small pizza place usually results in a lot more time prepping food than waiting tables, which results in less pay, but also less stress.
I walk the dog mid-day here in my Midwest suburb and you describe pretty much how I feel when I walk these sidewalks in the strange and wonderful near-quiet. I hadn’t thought to dub those moments as liminal spaces, but you’ve got me thinking about it, and looking forward to my next walk. Thanks for this. 🙂
I really resonate with this! I haven't heard of the term liminal spaces, but I definitely get the aesthetic. I'm a very nostalgic person, so maybe that's partly why.