… and put up a parking lot. Well, not exactly that, so far. Half of the green belt, in the back of my house is doomed. The first harbinger came months ago, in a notice about a change in zoning, affecting those homeowners who lived within a certain distance of an area where the city was proposing to change the situation to favor the establishment of… well, housing. Neither Judy, or I, or any of the other immediate neighbors could fathom what sort of housing was meant; small, free-standing cottages like our own? McMansions, with back bedroom windows that would command an intimate view of our backyards, and cut off our view to the sunset over the trees and grass, and the great marble faced Celtic cross put up at great expense by the congregation of St. Helena’s, the Catholic parish that owns the green belt behind all of our houses? Or some sort of apartment complex that would house an inordinate number of the rude, crude, low-rent and barely housebroken? Of such horrible possibilities are the stuff of suburban nightmares made. None of us are all that high-rent ourselves, but we do like our peace, and quiet, and a change in the status quo and view of the sunset over the greenbelt is not welcomed.

The presence of the greenbelt is precisely the reason I settled on this house, out of all those properties the realtor showed me, more than a decade ago; it was the smallest of the lot, about the most expensive, but the best-built… and that, over the fence at the back of the tiny house and tiny yard was nothing but green and open space. It made the place seem larger, oddly secluded, and very, very quiet. The greenbelt went all the way between the major cross-streets, with St. Helena’s floating in the middle of it like some great stone ship, the rest of it all empty and windswept. But it has all been nibbled away at the north, with short streets of development coming down to just short of the parish holdings, and now the southern part of it absorbed in one fell swoop; there is a fence across, just below Judy’s house, and everything to the south has been scraped, leveled, graded, terraformed and staked; I suppose to mark the eventual streets and house plots. The machinery of development has been hard at work during every working day for the last month; were I not at work during the day, the noise would drive me to distraction… that and the dust.

The dust blows in whenever the wind picks up— a fine, gritty grey coating on the floor and kitchen countertops. If I weren’t holding on to those precious weeks of cool evening temperatures, and low electrical bills, I would say the heck with that, close all the windows and run the AC; but the wisteria and the jasmine are blooming, the nights are cool— these are the days that I live for, all during the furnace-blasting heat in summer. I can’t possibly give it up. I just bought a formerly-expensive wind-chime (at a chain that provides up-scale goods at dollar-store markdowns) and I love to hear it at night, when the breeze picks up, and smell the jasmine, and hear the birds in the morning.

But the new houses are coming… not near to me, but close enough that I will have to see them when I look out at night, close enough to think about encouraging the hedge plants against the back fence to grow tall, and leafy enough that I don’t have to see them. The Lesser Weevil has trashed a lot of the back yard, after the December frost got to it first, but Blondie and I put up an electric fence to keep her out of the borders, and the construction company (from those nice people who did the roof last year) came today to pressure-wash the whole place, and tomorrow they will do some small repairs to the siding and trim, and over the next two weeks, Blondie and I and maybe Judy, and some of our friends, will repaint the house exterior. (Peach colored, with white and sage-green trim, for anyone who cares to know about fine details like that.) I have it in mind to Weevil-proof the back yard by fencing off a small part of it just for her, and doing the space that was formerly a patch of lawn in gravel and limestone pavers… with maybe a small water-feature in the middle—something modest, to trickle a small steam of water into a pool, in the middle of a collection of jewel-toned pottery planters full of herbs and lemon tree-shrubs… a private paradise.

Something dog-proof, anyway. It is shaping up to be a long, and hot, and dry summer, so making it xerioscape would be even better.