vestigial - adjective - forming a remnant of something that was once larger.
Vestigial is an uncommon descriptive word that I came across while paging through Ian McEwan's novel Amsterdam, the content of which is unrelated to the recent film with the same name. As I had not seen the adjective used in a while, I looked it up. The meaning is a bit confounding because if you were to take the participle "forming" and change it to the infinitive "to form," the definition would work better for a verb although the word doesn't look like one. The way I see it is that something vestigial is merely a portion of what was once significantly bigger, like the current architectural trend of the American farmhouse.
It used to be that farmhouses were built on farms, vast tracks of flat lands where undulating fields of corn or other crops that undulate–or not–could be planted. Iowa, a beautiful, verdant state with much in the way of undulation due to ubiquitous, circulating breezes, has plenty of stereotypical farmhouses on stereotypical farms. This past July, while visiting Dyersville, Iowa, my daughter and I had the pleasure of sitting on the porch of the classic white farmhouse used in the iconic film Field of Dreams. There was, fortunately, nothing vestigial about it albeit since a developer from Chicago bought the farm recently and is planning on converting it and the surrounding acreage into the Disney Land of baseball, the original farmhouse will become a remnant of the past by 2025. But I digress.
What I am trying to communicate in a circuitous fashion is that farmhouses are no longer being built on farms. They are being put up in the suburbs on plots of land just capacious enough for them. Forget about fields. On less than an acre, there are no exterior "dreams" to be had since Shoeless Joe Jackson and the White Sox probably won't be meandering over the asphalt anytime soon. Even if they were to do so, their pilgrimage would be far from romantic. Let's face it. Cornfields are a lot more believable as Heaven than pavement.
But for some ineffable reason, the newly reimagined, reconstituted farmhouse is quickly becoming the dream house of choice. It is yet another trend that doesn't quite make sense to me as the farmhouse without the farm is just a white clapboard (now vinyl) house with numerous windows laced in black trim (like the stationery Germans use to announce a death in the family), matching black roof and garage door, and several asymmetrical gables, blocking out all sunlight from reaching the neighboring homes like mine. I don't know about you, but I never considered farmhouses to be aesthetically pleasing edifices. They are just simple, just average, just nothing-to-write-home-about homes: comfortable, practical, ordinary.
Which could very well be why the vestigial suburban farmhouse (oxymoron!) is in vogue. At the base of Everyman's dreams could just be the concept of basic: the basic house, the basic Lazy Boy recliner, the basic Sony sixty-inch plasma TV, the basic black and white farmhouse. Don't worry. It is okay to want basic. After all, modesty is supposed to be an American value. Yet would you pay a million dollars for the status quo? I wouldn't.
I guess some of us just have dreams that don't come in black and white and aren't vestigial .
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