Monday - 01/18/2021 — It never fails to amaze me when I walk outside this time of year and find this kind of evidence of spring: flowers springing up from the floor of the forest behind my house.
There’s a house about two miles from mine that has delighted me for the past 21 years (ever since I moved here to the other side of Hog Mountain). Each spring their entire front yard (a grove of widely spaced trees) has been carpeted with daffodils. Shades of Wordsworth’s poem haunt the place. My heart truly does “fill with pleasure” when I see that “host of golden daffodils.”
Now, though, there are chains across both ends of the circular driveway. There’s construction going on next door to it and behind the house as well. Somebody who owned a large lot with a lovely pond sold to a developer who leveled the gentle hills, filled in the pond, clear-cut the land (at least seventy-five acres, maybe more), and is building townhomes that will funnel masses of traffic onto our already over-filled roadway. I’ve always made sure to avoid the road during morning and afternoon/evening commute times. Soon it will be much worse.
I guess it was all too much for the daffodil people. Maybe they don’t want to be surrounded by all that bustle. Maybe they were offered an insanely inflated price for their land. But now, I never know when I head out to go to the library for curb-side pickup of a book I’ve ordered, whether the bulldozers will have leveled the house, cut down all those stately trees, and gouged up the daffodils.
This part of the world will be poorer when that happens.
