Change Comes to My Part of the World

I live on a street of small Capes. There have been some expansions and renovations over the years, including one house that added a full second story before we moved there 27 years ago. Two houses at the very end of our long street became large, new, houses some time ago. Some people call them the Guard Houses because they sit at the end like sentinels.

The streets on either side of us started to go large long ago. The little house in back of us disappeared one afternoon. My son came down from a three hour nap and said “Where’s the house?” It had gone from house to hole in the ground in such a short time. He would later refer to the replacement as “The Plywood Overcast” because it blocked the sun at some point during the day. And there is the house nearby we refer to as “The Cliff” because it sits on a rise, with a sort of blank back side to us, looming over the neighborhood.

We’ve gotten used to those and the other large houses on the adjacent streets to the point that we no longer notice them much. Our own house is a standard post-war Cape with the back porch converted to a family room long ago. The Guard Houses are starting to blend into the neighborhood as well, but the Red House, which sits at the exit to the local elementary school and which replaced a small house some years ago, continues to look VERY BIG and VERY RED. It is also, unfortunately, very empty. Perhaps not everybody wants a really big house.

Houses have sold on our street now and then, but always to buyers who were looking for something they could renovate rather than rebuild. But then the elderly owner of a house in roughly the middle of the block moved away and a For Sale sign went up. We hoped that renovation would be the case with this one, but it appeared to be in poor shape and a tour inside did not encourage us. This one had gone beyond the fixer-upper stage.

The local newspaper brought us the bad news that the house had sold for quite a bit more than the asking price after at least 35 prospective buyers lined up. Well, bad in the sense that a large house was going to be in our future, but encouraging in another. When the time comes for my wife and me to sell our own Cape, we will probably realize more of a profit than we had planned for.

The SOLD sign went up followed by a more ominous sign—one for a surveyor. I spoke to the crew who told me that they were also doing work to place the foundation and that the planned house “would not be small.” I felt especially bad for the families who live on either side and across the street because all of those houses are nicely cared for and the new house will probably be out of scale with them.

The trees on the property came down soon after the surveyor left, big trees which had been there since the house was built more than fifty years ago. The last to go was a large, leaning, pine which sat squarely on the property line. Here I differ with some. If I were building a new house, no matter what size, on a small lot like the ones in my neighborhood, I would probably take a hard look at the life expectancy of the trees on my property. Like all of us, trees have a lifetime which is not forever. Unfortunately, most of the trees on my block were planted at the same time and now all are becoming elderly and at least some need to be replaced. The storm in October of 2011 and the hurricane this past year did some pruning with several of my neighbors taking a hint from Nature and engaging tree services to do even more, post-storm, trimming. We have all been looking at our trees with a tougher, but more worried, eye. We value them, but we also do not want to lose a roof. Taking down a mature tree on a small lot with houses all around it can be an expensive undertaking. Taking down a tree in the front yard can be difficult, but taking down one in a small backyard can make a huge dent in one’s wallet..

I wasn’t surprised when the neighbors who shared the pine tree with the empty house elected to let it go. And I will probably do some more pruning of the big maple in my backyard and the apple trees in my front yard to keep the walkways clear and allow some sun to get to the garden along with keeping branches laden with snow from scraping off shingles in the winter.

Looking back, the fact that an early snowstorm brought down the tree in our front yard four days after we moved in many years ago, was probably a good thing. It turned out that the trunk had extensive rot so the two apple trees replaced whatever was there before. Diversity is only rarely bad and that includes age and type of tree.

When we moved here all those years ago, we were the couple with the youngest kids. Then our kids became the oldest kids, but other families moved in with young children. Now our children are past college and working and the children who replaced them are being replaced by other children. We are sort of in our third, or maybe fourth, generation of children on the block which is really a healthy sign.

Of course houses have a life cycle just like people and just like trees. Our block lasted longer than many, but now it appears we are about to get a middle-of-the-block big house. I just hope they don’t put up big fences to match the big house. So far, the yards on our side of the street are only lightly fenced which seems to make us into more of a neighborhood. In an earlier column I wrote that while I know most of the people who live near me, I know almost nobody who lives in a house with a big fence.

It was inevitable that a house would be replaced just as someday all of them on my block will be replaced along with all of the inhabitants. We don’t live in a static world. But I wish it could have remained semi-static just a bit longer … At least until we sell ours at some point down the road …