Living Room

When my father first moved to West Jordan, Utah in 1979, it was a frontier. Bangerter Highway, which lies little more than a stone's throw to the East of my family's home of over thirty years, had not yet been built. To the West was nothing but spacious fields and large trees, and if you traveled South you wouldn't find much more. it was, for all intensive purposes, the edge of civilization.
The street where I grew up is divided on both sides into one-acre lots, providing the opportunity for residents to raise horses and livestock, and earning it the nickname "the horse-acres." My family never did have a horse, but we have had pigs, goats, peacocks, rabbits, dogs and cats and many other pets. Sometimes when we look out the kitchen window we will see an urban cowboy and his horse sauntering down the asphalt road.
These days West Jordan is much less a frontier and much more a sprawling city of suburbs and subdivisions, reaching further and further into the West and expanding the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. This growth has made it the fourth-largest city in the state and opened up new economic and recreational opportunities for thousands of people. At the same time, though, it is not uncommon for new developments to be sectioned off into quarter-acre lots or smaller, barely big enough for a house and a tiny back yard. Am I contending that it is wrong to live on a small piece of land? Not at all. What I WOULD like to do is rejoice in the great privilege that I had to grow up in an environment of stillness, space, and exploration, and ponder the impact that this environment had on shaping my childhood.