The Snow Globe We Grew Up In
The places we grew up in have been — in too many cases — demolished, abandoned and forgotten.
Our first elementary school, as well as the one they built to replace it. Our junior high, too. The malls where we met up with friends and figured out if we were a size you could find at Lerner’s or a size your mom found for you at Lane Bryant. The bowling alleys and skating rinks where we hid from our parents. Even shy kids could enjoy those places if they were in any way steady on their feet. The movie theaters and bookstores were for kids like me. We’d spend Friday night making out with our boyfriends while Sigourney Weaver battled aliens on the screen, and Sunday afternoon watching Home Alone with our families.
The rolling hills where we’d take trash can lids on snow days, makeshift sleds for Southern kids more accustomed to ice than powder. The wide open fields in front of our subdivisions, buffering our neighborhoods from traffic, noise and light pollution — what little of that there was.
And the theme park hulking in the distance, its stages once a place for talented pageant queens to break out as country stars, its roller coasters and water rides packed into a surprisingly compact footprint, its parcels sorted into Rockwellian themes — “Doo Waa Ditty City”, “The American West”, and “State Fair”. It’s gone, too, ironically replaced with a shopping mall.
The Pre-Tech 90s
Ours is a generation whose childhood playgrounds were the Nashville suburbs, whose time was the pre-tech 80s and 90s, whose mothers worked, whose towns were small but about to grow up and leave us wondering where we’d come from.
If our community had been more rural, or more urban, or 30 years older or 30 years younger, we may not have grown the way we did — losing the literal places that hold our core memories, searching Reddit threads and therapists’ offices and rehab centers for what happened to us.
Much of our childhoods remain frozen in snow globes of nostalgia or trauma. We can’t go back, unpack and reprocess the places where we fought with our best friends, where we had our first kisses, where we begged our parents to let us stay for just one more hour. We grew up before social media and digital cameras. In some ways we’re relieved about that. In other ways, our memories are slipping because things are not documented the way our kids’ things are. We can’t see now with our adult eyes what we experienced as children. When we think of those places, we ourselves are still in school.
Nashville Before Nashvegas
This is my perspective as someone who grew up in suburban Nashville — Mt. Juliet, to be precise — in the 80s and 90s. It was still a small town with a sort-of mid-sized city in the middle of everything. We had one fast food restaurant for most of our childhood (Hardee’s). We did our “real” grocery shopping in Hermitage, though we did “everyday” runs at the small local chain near our house where my friends and I all worked as teenagers. You could get from Mt. Juliet to Franklin two counties over in 45 minutes, no problem, and that was before I-840 was constructed.
People could sense growth was coming, though. About half the kids I went to high school with had parents who’d grown up in Wilson County, and the other half — like my brother and me — had parents who’d come from somewhere else and worked in Nashville. We were the smoke before the fire.
People talked for years about someone building a “mall” in the field in front of Belinda City, the quiet neighborhood where many of my friends lived. That field is now the Providence development, location of more than 2,000 homes and 50 retailers like Target and Best Buy. Every chain restaurant you can think of can be found within a mile or two of the Providence exit, which is remarkable to me because I remember how excited we were when we finally got a Cracker Barrel there (which is especially ironic given that Cracker Barrel is headquartered in the same county!).
Lest I feel trapped in my snow globe, unable to sort nostalgia-tinged memories from data-driven reality, I’ll throw out a few Census Bureau stats to confirm the changes:
There were roughly 10,000 people living in Mt. Juliet in 1995 when I graduated high school. In 2022, there were more than 42,000.
It makes sense. As Nashville became a grown-up employment hub and tourist destination, many neighboring towns like Mt. Juliet became bona fide suburbs with their own commercial and retail infrastructures. Those newcomers like my family are now the majority. And, because karma eventually catches us all, some of us original newcomers now miss the very thing we helped to change.
A Moment in Time
When I have visited by husband’s hometown in rural West Tennessee, he and his mother have delighted in showing me all the markers of his youth — the football field, the house with the crazy Christmas decorations, the mud flats where people party on weekends.
But despite the fact that my husband and I live just an hour or so from Mt. Juliet, I’ve never once taken him there. Everything I can think to show him is either gone or squeezed between big boxes.
I love telling him how when I was a kid, we would drive into Nashville just to watch people getting off planes at the airport. It was before 9/11 and you could do that then. And parking was free.
Despite my reminiscing, though, I am not one of those people who longs for a different time, or is bitter about change.
I remember when Lower Broadway wasn’t much more than porn shops. I remember my car being broken into at the old Sounds stadium. I remember looking at myself in dressing room mirrors at Hickory Hall mall and inexplicably seeing chunky thighs and frizzy hair. I remember being the awkward kid at the skating rink, the liberal Lutheran at conservative churches, and the girl who’d rather be browsing books at Davis Kidd with my mom than drinking at a field party with kids I barely knew.
I am grateful for the passage of time, good city planning, nice restaurants, therapy and airport security. Nashville has matured, and so have I.
And yet, I am grateful for the writers and artists and stewards of the past, especially of 80s and 90s Middle Tennessee. Some of us may have sensed our time was fleeting, but some of us were just children. And every day of childhood lasts a million years. We had no idea we were there but for a moment, and for that I’m glad. I think it would have broken my young heart.
