All posts filed under: Personal History

The Park, 1996-?

January 9, 2020
by Alison Fields
Family History / Houses / Nostalgia / Personal History / Uncategorized

(This is Part 8 of a series, Part 7 is here) You never expect the Deep Suburbs. Not when you’re a young person inclined believe they are dystopias, whose bookshelves are packed with searing indictments of, whose politics are starkly aligned against, whose internal jukebox comes programmed with so many songs decrying, whose family (you believed) were absolutely committed to the revitalization of the urban core and strictly anti- the interests, ideologies and infrastructure that […]

Randolph, 1994-1995

December 13, 2019
by Alison Fields
Houses / Nostalgia / Personal History

(This is Part Seven of series. Part Six is here.) Let’s get this out of the way: I hated college. Maybe I was destined to. I’ve spent an adult life (and nearly twenty years, post college living in a college town) trying to work out whether the problem is me or the institution. Probably me. Like most of life’s great disappointments, it wasn’t supposed to be that way. College was supposed to be the best […]

Sherwood, 1991-?

December 11, 2019
by Alison Fields
Family History / Houses / Nostalgia / Personal History / Uncategorized

(This is Part Six of a series. Part Five is here.) At some point in the last three decades, my sister and I became fixated on the geography of Dad’s basement. We know where it starts, at least in a material sort of way, but we’re not entirely sure of where it ends “Across the street? A couple of miles away? Canada?” It’s a joke, of course, but one rooted in the peculiar reality of […]

Griffing, 1991-1996

December 10, 2019
by Alison Fields
Family History / Houses / Nostalgia / Personal History

(This is Part Five of a series. Part Four is here.) The end of Junior Year, the Countess and I were taking our traditional circuit—shoegaze, cigarettes, a self-guided architectural tour through the fanciest neighborhood in town, which was on the opposite side of town from our own, and through which we could (illicitly) cut on the way to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Countess had a favorite house, a Gatsbyish ersatz chateau, slightly reminiscent of […]

Fenner, 1991

December 6, 2019
by Alison Fields
Family History / Houses / Personal History

(This is the fourth part in a series, the third part is here) I liked the apartment at Fenner. It was light and airy, with wide third-floor windows and views that made Asheville look like an actual, real deal city in the distance. Dad kept birds, two striped finches, in a cage by the kitchen, and continued to feed and water an escaped hamster, Hamlet, out of a couple of antique Spode saucers by the […]

Haywood, 1990-91

December 5, 2019
by Alison Fields
Family History / Houses / Nostalgia / Personal History

(This is the third part of a series, part two is here) It was a big deal when the condos were finished. The building was one of the first fully-renovated, maybe the first fully-renovated residential building downtown. In those days, downtown was a millimeter removed from ghost town, and probably still read that way to most people, save my mother, who’d spent the last five years running a non-profit to convince people otherwise. When she’d […]

Into the Woods

September 10, 2019
by Alison Fields
Personal History

The thing about the required three-day camping trip was that I knew it was coming. We’d been informed at admission to boarding school that one day, quite without notice, the spiteful gods of sodden sleeping bags would demand their tribute, and no foul weather, no cunningly worded doctor’s note, no comprehensive catalog of outdoors-related psychic trauma would save you. I’d been dreading the trip since matriculation and found reminders of its incipient horror everywhere, from […]