A few hours of poring over genealogies and plat maps had led me to a farm-themed, somewhat twee subdivision of single-family homes and detached condominiums, wedged between the interstate and a shopping plaza. I’d driven past it many times, always snickering at the silo someone had inexplicably decided to outfit as a lighthouse—if you squinted. But walking down the sidewalk from that ersatz lighthouse and realizing that this had once been my family’s farm, I found it less amusing.
An old newspaper clipping and an entry on Find a Grave suggested that somewhere on this property, I should find a marker that read, in Dutch, “Here lies Aaltje Sprik and five of her children.” And so I wandered past the remaining farm buildings, scanning the ground for any sign of stone.
It was, I admit, odd behavior. It was late afternoon, and residents were beginning to trickle home from their city jobs, SUVs rolling into freshly paved driveways. I wasn’t surprised when a woman paused, watching me. “Can I help you find something?” she asked, her voice polite but wary.
I told her.
In hindsight, announcing that her shiny new dream home and kids’ swing set were sitting on a forgotten cemetery might not have been my best strategy. Her mouth formed a silent “O,” her response stammered and nonsensical before she turned and fled. No help to be had there.
Most of the acreage had been swallowed by new homes, a manicured clubhouse, and a community pool. But one hill remained untouched. It rose above the rows of tidy houses, crowned with a ring of old trees and a metal windmill, its bent fins spinning lazily in the hot July breeze. Clearly the site of the old farmhouse—though the house itself was long gone. No trace of even a foundation remained.
What struck me most was that the developers, who had bulldozed and parceled every square inch of this land, had chosen not to build here. Not even to level it. It was as if the grave of the old farmhouse had been sacrosanct. While perhaps the grave of great-great-grandmother Aaltje had not.
This development was, in some ways, like any other that dots the American landscape. It had the requisite meaningless name, chosen to evoke some sanitized vision of rural charm. Its houses stood in stultifying sameness, row after row of vinyl-sided boxes with two-car garages, their mailboxes perfectly aligned like sentries at attention.
But unlike most developments, which begin with bulldozers wiping away every trace of what came before, this one retained a few stubborn remnants. The silo. A small barn. A tool shed. The windmill. They jutted out like bones from the soil, fragments of a skeleton no one seemed to recognize.
And yet the people who lived here moved through their days as if those bones meant nothing. The Sprik homestead had been reduced to a ghostly backdrop for lives that hurried back and forth, never stopping to ask what stood here before them. Was it a specter only I could see? The place that once lived here was dead. But somehow nothing had truly risen in its place. The land was still here, but the place—its genius loci, its spirit—was an amnesiac, stumbling forward without memory, without identity.
This was not my place, and it never would be. What was once my family’s homestead had succumbed to the slow death that is the fate of severed roots, sacrificed to that most American of impulses—the need to move onward and upward. But I doubted that those who lived here now were any more rooted than I was. Most would stay for five, maybe ten years, until a new job or a bigger house or some vague sense of restlessness pulled them away. They would leave behind their neatly manicured lawns and HOA-approved porches for another subdivision with an equally forgettable name, in a place that felt just as much like nowhere.
The people in this development have no reason to know about Aaltje Sprik and her children. To them, this is just home—a home that may change in five or ten years when a better job or a bigger house calls them elsewhere. But without shared memory, without a sense of inheritance, the idea of home becomes unmoored. Instead of being a place we return to, home becomes nothing more than the house we leave behind.
I wasn’t the first to go looking for traces of the past here. In 1996, one of my distant Sprik cousins placed a new marker for Aaltje and her children—perhaps believing that if the land had to change, at least their memory could remain. It was the newspaper clipping about that marker that set me on this search in the first place.
But as I walked through the development, scanning the ground, I found no sign of it. Had it been quietly removed so as not to disconcert the new residents? Had it sunk into the earth, forgotten, just as the farmhouse had? It was unsettling to think that even this small gesture—an attempt to keep the past visible—had been swallowed by time in less than a generation.
Suburbia is full of such places—not just in Michigan, but across the country. Places where the past has been bulldozed, commemorated only in the marketing brochures of developers who name subdivisions after the very things they destroyed: Fox Hollow, Maple Grove, Orchard Estates, or anything with the word “Heights” in it. Here, even the attempt at preservation—the leftover silo, the windmill, the barn—is little more than a stage set. They are artifacts without context, aesthetic gestures that fail to tell a story.
The contrast between the shiny new development with its fake rural charm, like an iPhone in a gingham case, and the deeply rooted community just down the road that has fewer “modern farmhouse” touches but more genuine welcome begs the question: What is “the good life”? Is the good life measured in promotions and bigger houses, in escaping home for vacations to Aspen and Cabo? Or is it found in the quiet, steady presence of a place truly known and truly knowing you? A place that can be left in good hands when you’re gone, to be stewarded as you stewarded it. To be remembered by neighbors, even memorialized in stories and referred to in local lore. My grandmother had a large, glorious flower garden for decades, spilling over with gladiolas, poppies, and roses. When the city paved the small alley that ran along the side of that garden and made it a proper road, it became Rose Lane. Even though the flowers are gone, neighbors can still tell you why Rose Lane is Rose Lane.
Even though the flowers are gone, the memory remains—not as a plaque in an office, but as a name on the lips of neighbors who still tell the story.
But what about the old Sprik Homestead, now re-dubbed “Prairie Winds”? There is no Prairie. The wind comes and goes as it does for the rest of the region, with no particular regard for this specific development. The result is not a real place, but a landscape of ephemera. A “built environment,” as the urban planners phrase it, where nothing is meant to endure and no one is expected to stay. The families who buy homes here do not intend to put down roots. Most will move on, following job opportunities, school districts, or the simple restlessness that seems to be a requirement of modern life. These neighborhoods do not offer continuity, only transition. And so the people who live in them are not from here. Not really. They are merely here for now.
This is the quiet tragedy of suburban America. It is full of people who have houses but not homes. Who live in communities but do not belong to them. Who exist in a space that once was somebody’s place—but is now nobody’s. We feel it—and try to deny it by hanging a sign in the living room that says, “Home is Where the Heart is.”
Even those of us who live in one place for a long period often do so as if we are transient. We sit lightly upon our place, residing there but not truly inhabiting. For that requires a connection with the place beyond our individual memories of living there. We must become part of a shared history, knit into a common past, and take a place in line between those who came before and those who will come after.
The poet Donald Hall, speaking about the place he called home, once wrote, “I live on land that is thick with the known dead, people I have loved or heard of, and with the unknown dead, from earlier centuries.” He meant it literally, I think, but also in the sense that a real place is layered with memory. But what happens when no one remembers? When the ground is still thick with the dead, but no one living even knows their names? Or knows where the markers lie?
America has always had a restless streak, but many of the pioneers put down roots when they stopped. Some built homes meant to last, planted orchards they wouldn’t live to see bear fruit, laid out roads that followed the land instead of being imposed on it. But now? Now, we bulldoze the past to make way for the future. Old houses are torn down for new developments. Farms give way to strip malls and subdivisions with names that try a little too hard to sound quaint. The places we live weren’t built to last, and most of the people in them don’t plan to stay.
Maybe that’s why so many people feel adrift. They’re living in places that were never meant to be places at all—just waystations, holding pens between one move and the next.
Developments like the one that used to be the Sprik homestead erase not just that history but also the continuity of the place. Where once generations of Spriks lived, farmed, went to church, buried their dead, and rubbed along with their neighbors, now a collection of transient souls come and go, ignorant and incurious about what came before.
Modern suburbia traffics in a kind of false memory, using architectural flourishes—faux farmhouses, cupolas, barn-shaped clubhouses—to create an illusion of rootedness without the substance. But these are gestures, not inheritances. The past is reduced to a marketing tool, a vague aesthetic meant to evoke a sense of belonging without requiring actual ties to the land. A silo wearing a lighthouse costume. A cotton candy version of a real rural community that dissolves as soon as it hits the tongue.
Nostalgia becomes a marketing tactic, and a powerful one. But it’s a superficial type of nostalgia that looks back on the past with rose-colored glasses, attempting to evoke the pleasant sensation of happier days. Anthony Esolen, in his book Nostalgia, translates the Greek term as instead meaning, “the ache for the return.” This sorrow of being exiled from where one belongs is what I felt from the top of that hill, beneath its lonely windmill.
This ache is not about pining for a simpler time but about the human need for continuity. When a place is severed from its history, when its new inhabitants have no memory of what stood before, it becomes placeless—geography without identity. The loneliness of modern life stems not just from physical disconnection but from this lack of rootedness, from the inability to say, Here, my people lived. Here, they built. Here, they remain.
The Sprik homestead is lost to me. Never again will it be rolling farmland, surmounted by a fine white farmhouse. But the Spriks are only one part of my own family history. A few miles away, in what once was the town of Forest Grove, there is another old family homestead. The house and farm building have been sold out of the family but still stand, well-kept and keeping vigil over pastures and fields. More, a long-lost distant cousin still owns some of the land. I stopped for a visit and was treated to several hours of stories about his place, his people—also my people—and their relationship to each other. His uncle, who shared my profession. The stained glass window in the local church that bears the family name. Stories about John Zander and his twin brother Pebe—who was disabled but was cared for and loved by the whole community. Something that resonates with me, as my family also deals with disability.
This place knows itself. And the people who live there know their place within that story. It’s still here and still a real place. The post office is gone long since. The state doesn’t recognize it as even a village. But to the people who live here, it is their place. And they are of this place. An integral part of a community that defies the rushing stream of modern footlooseness going by on the interstate, a few miles away. The appeal of that sort of resilience, of knowing each other more deeply, pulls strongly.
There are still places that remember themselves. Whose inhabitants know them intimately and love them deeply. Where even a new transplant can learn the local history, get to know their neighbors, and become a small part of the larger story being told. If you can find such a place, commit to making its acquaintance. Listen to the local lore, research the history, visit the cemeteries, find the local coffee shops where people talk to each other. You can’t become rooted in a place until you understand it, know its contours, taste its flavors. I don’t know if my husband and I can write ourselves into the story of Forest Grove. Perhaps we are only footnotes, names barely spoken before they are forgotten. But still, we listen. Still, we linger. Because some places remember themselves—and, if we are careful, they may remember us too.
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