Houses in the Fields (apologies to John Gorka)

Sat on the back porch today, waiting while my newly adopted dog sniffed at everything and did her biological business, reflecting on the landscape around me. The air filled with the sound of migrating Canadian geese; in the distance was the sound of a woodpecker and a distant neighbor's barking dogs. Our home is recently constructed in the middle of a cow pasture on the old family farm, with rolling hills around as far as you can see and a huge, open, star studded sky at night, but as I waited for Chloe to finish her explorations, I couldn't help but wonder, how long can it stay this way?

Yesterday I drove near my old neighborhood in Charlotte (incidentally, on the way to and from Judy Chicago, which my sister sums up beautifully in her blog) which itself was once open farmland. Now there are rows and rows of treeless, mind-numbingly similar subdivisions, disorientingly and dispiritingly alike, punctuated by the same mega-corporate chain stores one can find from Detroit to Decatur. It is the America John Steinbeck predicted nearly fifty years ago in Travels with Charley. I moved only 4 years ago and barely recognize the landscape.

We live in a thriving region, which has many advantages, but one of the disadvantages is that the South I have come to love, the rolling countryside, the sleepy small towns, the family ties to land and place, is being overwhelmed by growth. Not orderly, measured growth, natural and desired, but a rampant and malignant excrescence that disfigures and blights its host. Hastily constructed neighborhoods spring up and spread like kudsu, with no time to plan for the type of design or construction that might feed the spirit or foster community.

Now I have enough red-blooded hillbilly in me to believe if you want to sell your land for profit, that's your business. But my heart sinks each time I see a parcel for sale, and the signs creep nearer and nearer to my own cherished open space. It's not that I dislike density--I love real cities, with their history and the energy that springs from the wonderful stew of diverse people and cultures bubbling in the same pot--or that I don't understand that the influx of new people needs a place to live. It's just that what I love most about any place is its sense of place, whether that be the outrageous chaos of Rome or the quiet melancholy of the Appalachians.

Growth seems like a giant amoeba, mindlessly absorbing everthing around it into one insentient, amorphous whole. The larger cities have their identities; I worry about all the smaller places in between. I worry about what becomes of individuality, creativity, when the experience of living in one place blurs into the next with no distinctions. I fret at the thought that we have to travel farther and farther to find something different from our own landscape. Will individuality flounder, or will it manage to simmer up from the bland stew of contrived lifestyle neighborhoods and homeowners' association restrictions?

It's a good problem we have, to live in a place where we can debate growth; where, poorly designed and executed or not, at least it's housing, but then, are stewardship and conservation of the land really a luxury?

I will go out with the dog once more tonight, and drink in the night sky while I can. And, with a nod to my former homeowners' association, when the dog poops, I will leave it to become a part of the landscape.