What makes a place beautiful? What makes it a good place to live?

I grew up in a small industrial town in Eastern Europe, in a mid-rise apartment building that had 4 apartments on each floor and 8 floors in total. It was towards the edges of town, in a residential neighbourhood that mixed mid-rise buildings and single family homes that usually had a back yard with some chickens. From my balcony on the 5th floor, I could see those single family houses, one mid-rise building, a horse track in the distance, fields and some buildings that my dad told me were army barracks.

It was a flat place, no geographical features. The town had an oil refinery and quite a few people in those single family homes used coal burning stoves to keep themselves warm in the winter, so the air quality wasn’t the best.

There wasn’t a library near by, nor a community centre. My school was about a 40min walk away from home. I walked to school every day.

Every time I reach back in memory, though, I remember it being sunny. I remember playing outside, with kids from my building or kids from the neighbouring buildings, out on the fields surrounding our buildings, in the shrubbery, climbing trees that grew near the local roads that were so local they didn’t even have a painted strip on them to separate the supposed 2 lanes. I remember playing with groups of children, some of whom I knew from my building, others who were unknown, until evening, when dusk turned into night and the dusty tang of the air started to feel cool.

We were happy, I think. We had autonomy to come and go from our apartments as long as parents knew where we were going to be.

One time a group of us were playing across the street from my building where a new mid-rise was being built; the workers had just dug the foundation and since it was the weekend, we went exploring. We were all curious about the yellow clay that was under the surface of the black dirt and grass that was everywhere. I think I nearly fell into the hole, the safety fence was more of a safety suggestion, built out of rebar and some flexible orange mesh. The group I was with climbed down somehow into the bottom of the foundation and spent happy time digging around in the clay, messing around with each other, glad to find a new, different space in our same old neighbourhood.

My mother complained about the mud every time it rained, moaning about having to park in “(TownName) mud” just to get home, which was true, there was some paved street parking across from our building, but not enough, so people parked on the verge and where they could and it usually wore ruts in the ground. When I was younger, I loved playing in the mud with a friend – we’d make mud pies, decorate them, dig, it was heaven!

It wasn’t a beautiful place, but it was a happy place in which to grow up.

When I was a kid, the aesthetics of a place didn’t matter to me, what mattered is having people to play with and the freedom to go outside since there wasn’t that much to do in the house. I had read all the books, had my fill of drawing, listening to music, there was nothing much on TV for children, so I’d go outside, find people to play with and it’d all be good. I didn’t know what I was missing, there wasn’t any comparison between my town mud, the grass clump play houses, the sparse playground with seesaws and swings, and anywhere else.

Even after we had done some travelling around our country and in neighbouring countries, it was always ok to come back home. It was familiar, comforting.

As an adult, I have greater horizons, memories of various places I’ve visited and a nuance of feeling about places but I still lack the skill to actually create the type of beautiful place in which I would want to live. I don’t know, if I ever knew, how to create community with people who are not family or coworkers. I don’t know how to maintain friendships with other adults. Putting the work in feels unutterably boring, but it’s so necessary. That fabric of community was what made my childhood happy, yet it’s a challenge/chore/pain in the ass to find the energy and quiet down the existential anxiety that gets in the way of staying in touch with friends.

“Beautiful” was always somewhere else, somewhere away from home, without the clutter and obligations of home. A park, a cafe, a street, a favourite part of town or a well ordered living room that looked like a museum diorama, untouched. I don’t know how to create what I think of as a beautiful life because my ideas of what it is – a life of travel, dinners with friends, a clean, well appointed house, demure children amusing themselves in the background, calm and harmony – are not realistic for the direction my life has taken.

Instead, I do what I can: create beautiful moments with family and friends, offer my time and energy where I can and look deeply into people’s eyes to listen with my heart what they’re telling me about who they are.