Windy Suburbs

The season comes and the soothing warm sun stirs in the sky as a mighty wind whips the entire world into a fleeting form that drifts in and out of your consciousness. You sit amongst the green things and bend like a tree in the breeze, basking in the yellow rays, opening your eyes for no one yet spreading your arms wide for the world to come and join you in an endless summer embrace. The word suburb mostly refers to a residential area. It may be a residential area of a city (as in Australia and New Zealand), or a separate residential community within commuting distance of a city (as in the United States and Canada). Some suburbs have a degree of political autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods. Suburbs grew in the 19th and 20th century as a result of improved rail and later road transport and an increase in commuting. Suburbs tend to proliferate around cities that have an abundance of adjacent flat land. Any particular suburban area is referred to as a suburb, while suburban areas on the whole are referred to as the suburbs or suburbia, with the demonym being a suburbanite. Colloquial usage sometimes shortens the term to burb. The word is derived from the Old French subburbe and ultimately from the Latin suburbium, formed from sub, meaning "under", and urbs, meaning "city". In Rome, important people tended to live within the city hills. "Under" in later usage sometimes referred variously to lesser wealth, political power, population, or population density. The first recorded use in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from Wycliffe in 1380, where the form subarbis is used.