Cha-Cha-Changes (or Deep Thoughts with Farmer Pete)

I have had this post brewing in my head for a while, but I am not totally sure where it goes. But the advent of foliage season, with its accompanying crush of out of state license plates, seems like an appropriate time to try to tie together three recent related incidents.

First, my older brother went by The Farm a couple of weeks ago. The Farm is in Connecticut, and it is where my family used to spend the summer when I was a kid. As I discussed in an earlier post, it is perhaps one source of my farm dream.

In any event, thirty years later, The Farm is overgrown and uninhabited.

Here my Dad and I clean out horse stalls thirty years ago.

And here they are today.

The Farm is now owned by an out of town doctor who bought the place as an investment. He wants to raze the farmhouse (which dates back to 1790) and subdivide the acreage into four lots. He wants $1 millon for the land (or roughly $100,000 per acre).

I have a lot of fond memories from The Farm. It was a little tough to see it has fallen into disrepair, and to think that it may be subdivided to make room for some more McMansions. When I was a kid, the eastern shoreline of Connecticut was still mostly countryside and summer cottages. It has now become a suburb of New York with multi-million dollar waterfront homes, big, shiny cars, fancy coffee shops and cell phones. The last thing that area probably needs now is more development and McMansions. But I guess everything changes eventually. I just hope the people who live there now enjoy it as much as I once did. But I don't think I would like living there now.

The second incident was when I was driving somewhere the other day with my friend Harry. Harry grew up in the next town over, as did his father, as did his grandfather. We were discussing how much the area where I used to spend my summers in Connecticut had changed. This got Harry to talking about how much the Norheast Kingdom of Vermont where we live now has changed, just in the last fifteen years. Lots of people from out of state have moved up here with their professional degrees, and tried to do things like start organic vegetable farms. . . Harry didn't really say that -- he is much too nice and diplomatic to do that. But it almost got a little awkward, because we both knew that I was one of the out of state people that he was talking about. Despite the fact that in three short years I have begun to feel like a part of the landscape up here, folks whose families have been here for 200+ years will probably never consider me anything but a relative outsider. And the arrival of people like me must signal some of the same changes for Harry that the development of The Farm does for me now.

Lastly, our friend Cornelia, who works on the farm some, brought us a series of three articles from the Boston Globe, all discussing how great it is up here in the Northeast Kingdom. While the articles were kind of neat, and affirmed my feelings about the NEK, they really only made me wince. It made me realize that more people will probably continue to come up here, and in fifteen years, I may be just like Harry -- lamenting the vanishing Vermont that used to be.

What does it all mean? I am not sure. I definitely mourn the changes that development brings, and I tend to think that over-population and an economic system premised on continual, infinite growth can't be sustained. But for some reason, I don't dissolve into melancholy. Instead, I suppose I should savor what I have today, because this life is beautiful.