When I was five or six, my family moved from a small, remote house (our neighbors were a farm and a guy who raised emus) to an apartment, and then to one of the first homes built in a new suburban development. A big loop of road and the first three or four homes were the only things that sketched out how the entire area would eventually be separated into lots and filled; the rest was essentially undifferentiated fields, with occasional large piles of dirt left over from construction punctuating the horizon.
