Have you ever seen the Disney/Pixar movie Up? If not, you should. But then, I love Pixar movies.
Up begins by showing a delightful old house that is surrounded by construction. Carl, the homeowner, refuses to sell his house to the developer. So they build all around him.
That house was inspired by a real-life house in Seattle. The Edith Macefield house was still standing the last time I drove by it several months ago. But just barely. I’m surprised that it hasn’t collapsed on its own. It’s all boarded up. The shopping center that surrounds it on three sides has long threatened to demolish it now that they finally own the property, but they haven’t quite gotten around to doing so. It looks like an accident waiting to happen, or a squatter’s dream, but you have to admire Ms. Macefield’s determination to keep the home she must have loved a great deal, right up until she passed away.
Most of us can probably tell development stories. “I remember when there was a cornfield where that warehouse now stands.” “You used to have to drive through a forest to get to the next town over. Now it’s one long strip of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores.”
Urban sprawl seems to be the order of the day, and it’s heartbreaking. When we lose all our farms and forests and our quaint, unique single family homes and quirky little neighborhoods, we’ll have lost our souls, in my opinion. Every time I see a new housing complex crop up overnight, where all the houses are identical, or another condo high rise that looks like it was made of shipping containers, I feel a bit more claustrophobic than I felt the day before.
In the case of our house, we are experiencing the polar opposite of this phenomenon. We are surrounded on three sides by our town’s 154 acre public park. Dear Husband has lived here much longer than I have, and can remember horses and goats wandering around just to our south. When I got here, that old farm’s barn had been the backyard view for 100 years. (You can read my post about that wonderful old barn, which includes a stop action video of its demolition, here.)
DH can also remember when houses ringed the outer edge of the park. Over the years, the city has bought those homes, one by one, and demolished them to add acreage to the park. If you know where to look, you can find capped off wells throughout the area. That’s all that remains of what was once a vibrant neighborhood.
Our house is the only one left occupied in the park. (There is a property to our south that was just bought by the city, and I’m sure those buildings are not long for this world.) The city has offered to buy our home from us at fair market value, but we know that if we sell, the house will be razed, and every trace of decades worth of memories will be gone, except for two capped wells. We’re not quite ready to see that happen yet.
There is no requirement that we sell to the city, mind you. And this is probably the only property in the entire Pacific Northwest that is surrounded by land that will never be developed again. (That was a condition of the grant money that was used when the city purchased most of the parcels for the park that they’ve gotten to date.)
I’m sure that if we sold our home to a family, we’d get top dollar for it. In exchange, they’d get a one-of-a-kind property, and a faint echo of how things must have been when this entire town had a population of 277 people. Those people, incidentally, came to live here by snatching up all the quality bottom-land from the natives in order to raise their crops. Progress is only positive if you look at it from one angle.
Since we are the last holdout, standing in the way of the city having a perfectly square, pristine park, I like to think of our place as “the down house.” Someday it will be gone and forgotten, but until then, we’re holding on. When we sit on our back porch and listen to the coyotes howl and the eagles cry as the drag racers occasionally blast past on the highway out front, we feel that it’s incredibly worth it.
The ultimate form of recycling: Buy my book, read it, and then donate it to your local public library or your neighborhood little free library! http://amzn.to/2mlPVh5
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