As I sat in the back yard with Lucy late Wednesday afternoon, I suddenly looked around me at all the trees and started comparing my neighborhood to modern neighborhoods.
I had shown houses earlier in the afternoon in very nice (and very expensive) neighborhoods. My little house built in 1927 was certainly different in design, but there was a much more obvious difference.
The real difference in the way the neighborhoods feel — to me, at least — is in the trees.
The trees in my older neighborhood are the ones that were there when this was a forest. Most of them were left exactly where the builders found them. Because of that, there is a stunning natural canopy that covers much of the street. I’m enchanted by some of the bigger trees right around my house. They make me happy.
That organic feel is missing when I visit most of the nice newer neighborhoods where I show houses. Even in neighborhoods where the developer carefully planned buffer zones of trees, the yards feel more sterile. It’s very clear that someone bulldozed the whole place and then planted just enough decorative trees to look good on promotional brochures.
Predictions of doom keep failing, so isn’t it rational to doubt them?
Grow veggies in your own yard? ‘You’re heading to jail, you criminal’
Does change really come quickly? Or do we finally accept the truth?
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone