Paving Paradise

Just down the highway from my subdivision is an apple orchard. It's big, lining the highway for a quarter of a mile and extending back even further. I see it every time I pull out of the nearby grocery store and last year I enjoyed watching the apples grow and ripen as the year turned.

If I step out of my house and look left I can see the thick, undeveloped forest that covers the hills less than a mile from our house. There are houses up there, but they're spaced few and far apart, impossible to see within the trees unless you're nearly upon them.

Across the highway from our subdivision's entrance is a year round fruit stand. There are fields on either side of the stand, and behind, too. Cows wander them constantly, so that we never leave the subdivision without exclamations of delight from the preschooler.

There's a lot of that around here. Not just orchards, but pastures and fields, and undeveloped areas, making something as simple as driving to the store a gift to my eyes. It goes a long way toward making up for the fact that our lot is somewhat smaller than a handkerchief, as are all the lots in the subdivision.

It's not going to stay this way long, though. Just the other day I was driving past the orchard and saw a wide expanse of uprooted trees. To someone who loves trees as much as I do, it was gut-wrenching. I felt a little sick to my stomach the rest of the day. I haven't driven past since, afraid of what I'll see.

I'd guess the orchard owner sold at least part of the orchard to a developer. There's a huge demand for housing in this area. It's the last place where you can get somewhat reasonably priced housing within a drivable range of the city where the husband works.

If you read the local paper, you'll see a lot of outrage expressed over the huge influx of outsiders and what we've done to the housing market here. Letters to the editor, editorials, opinion columns by long-time residents, all expressing disdain for people like my family, and horror over the change to the landscape as our houses and subdivisions have sprouted up like diseased mushroom patches.

I feel very conflicted about all this. On the one hand, I'm appalled to see the changes just since we moved here. I bought three bushels of apples at that orchard last fall. Where am I going to go to buy apples for canning this next fall? I don't want to lose the cows to more cookie-cutter houses. I hate the way the houses in all the new developments are crowded in together, with no privacy and no room to spread out. The neighbors probably hear everything I say every time I lose my temper and yell at one of the girls.

Our family, though, is everything the locals complain about. The husband works 2 hours away from here. We only moved here because of the relatively cheap housing. (We can rent a house here for the cost of an apartment closer to the husband's job.) We're going to be buying a house this next summer. (We're renting now, which is wildly expensive. Not only are we paying into someone else's equity, we figured out we can buy a larger house than this one and pay less on the mortgage than we're currently paying for rent.) We don't know the area, we don't know the culture, we don't know the locals. Most of the people we meet are in the same position we're in, with one or both spouses gone most of the day to distant employment. I even met a cop who lives here because she can't afford to live where she works.

As guilty as I feel, though, I keep coming back to one question. What else are we supposed to do? I need somewhere to live. I need somewhere with room for my children to run around, somewhere with good schools and lots of fresh air. We just can't afford to have that anywhere but here.

It's not like we ever planned to move to this area. Those of you who have been following this a while might remember how we wound up in this mess. This was the only job we could find and this was the only place we could find to live in. As it is, I feel very grateful that we moved here before things got too expensive. It seems like house prices go up another several thousand dollars every couple of months. We've got to buy as soon as our lease is up because we can't afford to wait any longer.

Being in the position we are, how can I begrudge others moving here too, looking for a decent home and life, even with what it means in the loss of our rural setting?

I feel conflicted, but it doesn't affect my decision. We're buying here, and we're staying. I want a house with a yard and basement more than I want to help preserve this area. I want my children to have a good place to grow up more than I want orchards.

I just can't stop feeling guilty.