During the last of the 25 years we lived in the suburban town of Media, PA, witnessing the slow, deadly encroaching of industry over nature…I guess all I can write about is how I felt inside. I’m pretty sure I knew how my husband and son felt. We talked about it a lot.
All the wide green spaces, bought by development corporations…gone. I had to watch it every day. Media itself was a slow-moving, country town in 1977. It was a classic small town; at the hardware store, at the corner of State and Jackson Streets, you could get credit on a hand shake. But that’s not the part that hurt the most. Growing on the meadows that were bulldozed and covered over with concrete were–and this word haunted me–were indigenous plants and flowers. They were there because they were put there by nature. Now they were gone forever.
This is a popular subject and it’s easy to complain and rave about what can’t be helped. You have two choices–stay there and adjust as best you can or leave. We left.
The word indigenous never left my mind and the idea has become a part of me. Yes, it’s a poor economical situation here and yes, it’s not very easy to make friends. But I love it here anyway. You should taste our water. Better than any bottled water available and it comes from our own well.
Most of all, nature is very much alive here and yes–beginning in the spring I can look at all the things that are indigenous within the environment. It’s a bird-lovers paradise. We even get hummingbirds to fly up onto our porch. Owls really do say “whooo” at dusk–that never ceases to thrill me. I even love our bats. They really do hang upside down in our barn and sleep during the day and eat up all the insects at night.
What am I really trying to say? In Media I never thought about nature. I wasn’t one of the “tree-huggers” or the “spotted owl crowd.” Joni Mitchell wrote in her song about “pave paradise and put in a parking lot.” She also says that “you don’t know what you’ve lost till it’s gone.” I guess that describes me. My chest got tight and I’d get a knot in my stomach when I’d be forced to watch the horrible bulldozers and listen to the sounds they made. It was rape. Being here is rebirth. Added to this is the fact that we have lovely Amish neighbors. They are farmers and not interested in business or industry. They tend their gardens and farms; if you need an addition to your house or other carpentry done the men come and do it, precisely on time, for half of what others charge, and also in half the time.
When I have to leave here overnight I get ridiculously homesick. I just don’t like being in any other place. After my husband took me to see Taos, NM, in 2010 I lost any interest in traveling. It has become uncomfortable, expensive, can produce paranoia, and I’ve read that travelers go to Florence and Rome to breathe in great art…and the quaint old streets are adrift in McDonald’s bags, paper cups, plastic straws.
…and in Media, PA there really is a “tree museum” as Joni Mitchell said. It’s called Tyler Arboretum and they charge “…a dollar and a half just to see um.”
lgmwriting 