The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We used to stand in our garden and look out across the highway with great views of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound.  But, of course, inevitably progress reared its ugly head, the acreage on the bluff side got parceled and houses got built.  The new folks refused to honor some of the commitments the developer had agreed to, cut the green belt between us and closed off our promised access to the beach below.  Our ‘view’ rapidly became a suburb, our neighbors had themselves an Association and we planted evergreens along the road.

Jump ahead a few years and our hedge had grown into a 20 foot green wall, giving us total privacy to replace our view, not a bad trade-off.  Our neighbors on our side of the Green Curtain had also put in hedges so that for a stretch of highway across from the Association nothing could be seen of us pioneers and our less than majestic hovels.  Out of sight, out of mind, so say the philosophers of social inequity.

Eventually I made peace with the suburbanites.  Nice folks mostly, especially the second generation of newcomers.  And so one spring day I pruned the lower limbs of all the evergreen laurels lining the road, opening up views of our shack and gardens and greenhouses.  For days, for weeks, I cut and hauled and burned, slowly revealing what had been hidden for a decade and a half or more, our Shangri-La-La chic chalet and its estate.

One by one every neighbor dropped by to tell me how nice our pruning was, what a great difference, how pleased they were.  Good fences, I concluded, don’t make good neighbors, they screen them out.  The next year I cut those laurels down to the ground, the filberts too.  Even put up artwork along the road as a gesture of more goodwill this past year.  We get along okay, but lately, I don’t know, maybe just the ornery curmudgeon in me, maybe all the fighting going on over there this past year, I sometimes miss that big green wall.

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