By Scott Anderson
I moved to Fort Worth the summer before my fifth-grade year, a somewhat sheltered kid used to the mountains of Breckenridge, Colorado. I was too young, really, to understand where we were living at the bottom of the Bellaire Drive hill, except that there were a bunch of kids my age to play with and a bunch of streets to roam between our house, Overton Park and the Express Mart.
And even after growing up (well, growing older, anyway), and graduating from R.L. Paschal High School, I still didn’t understand where I had lived. It took moving to Austin and Durango, and then moving back to Fort Worth with my amazing wife, Debbie, to begin to understand where I lived, and with it, to understand myself a little better.
After a few years of renting in Arlington Heights, we started to look at the more affordable neighborhoods being built all over the place. We found a smallish house near Marine Creek Lake and we said, “Let’s go through the application process and learn what that’s like before we find a house we can buy.”
The next thing we knew, we’d bought a house with a small backyard facing a green space, in an area we knew next to nothing about.
A quarter of a century later, we know a good many of the nooks and crannies in the area and we spend a good deal of our lives on the western half of Loop 820. We’re still waiting for H-E-B to make good use of the land they bought on Boat Club Road (hint, hint). But they put in a Mama’s Pizza some time back, so that takes some of the sting out of being away from my old stomping grounds.
Our neighborhood is quiet-ish and has easy access to the walking paths around Marine Creek Lake. The little trees the city arranged for our neighborhood long ago are now full grown and provide some shade from these beastly Texas summers — nothing like the trees in the Tanglewood neighborhood from my childhood, of course. And we’ve come to know the seasons all too well from watching the green space as the leaves grow, wither, fall, and then grow again.
I don’t really know anyone in my neighborhood, save one gentleman I used to work with. I mean no offense to my neighbors in saying that. Being the introverted extrovert that I am, I wave when I take out the trash or pass them on the street. But my house and the green space it looks out on are where I truly live: my refuge from all the people, traffic and strip malls out there.
We see a number of deer and coyotes, the occasional rabbit and lots of birds. To our delight, a possum we’ve named “Perry” and a number of field mice have joined the squirrels in raiding the bird feeders outside our windows. To the delight of our cats, as well.
We’ve thought about moving time and time again, but would we be able to find a home that looks out on any kind of wilderness? When a cold front moves in, I can pull back my drapes and watch a wall of green swaying in the breeze. That’s worth a lot to me.
I did a lot of head-scratching and navel-gazing over this story. Where do I live? I mean, my house is here and my day-to-day world is loosely centered here, but my life is both bigger and smaller than my neighborhood, I think.
Like a lot of you, maybe, I think of myself as living in Funkytown, as loosely defined as that may be.
Scott Anderson has decades of experience working at a Fort Worth-based web and graphic design firm.
Marine Creek Estates
Total population: 2,512
Male: 52% | Female: 48%
Age
0-9: 9%
10-19: 22%
20-29: 11%
30-39: 18%
40-49: 5%
50-59: 13%
60-69: 13%
70-79: 6%
80 and older: 3%
Education
No degree: 2%
High school: 21%
Some college: 53%
Bachelor’s degree: 16%
Post-graduate: 8%
Click on the link to view the schools’ Texas Education Agency ratings:
Source: Census Reporter
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://fortworthreport.org/2026/04/11/where-i-live-marine-creek-lake-cherished-for-green-space-escape-from-busy-fort-worth-roads/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://fortworthreport.org”>Fort Worth Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/fortworthreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cropped-favicon.png?resize=150%2C150&quality=80&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://fortworthreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=482308&ga4=2820184429″ style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://fortworthreport.org/2026/04/11/where-i-live-marine-creek-lake-cherished-for-green-space-escape-from-busy-fort-worth-roads/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/fortworthreport.org/p.js”></script>