Page 103 - Contrast2012

land in between houses were seen as fields. I grew up in suburbanized
country. Our parents had left the cities and suburbs looking for a sim-
pler way of life only to convert it to the world they were familiar with.
What was once country became the suburbs to the suburbs. Housing
developments sprouted and their blooms bore shopping centers, new
schools, more restaurants and gas stations, and Wal-Mart.

My family was one of many that made that happen. I would be
reminded by the real townspeople that it was our fault that there would
have to be a bypass built, and that the place where I lived now had once
been a beautiful view from their window of a quite pasture. Now the
children were loud and ran barefoot up and down the street.

It was not a mountain. It was a glorified hill, but when I was
there, that didn't matter because it was mine. I suppose, when the devel-
oper was building the house, she had the paths wind around it leading
to the top, but no one ever used them. The path began at the end of
the neighborhood that had yet to be built. I took a shortcut through a
backyard to reach it. There was long grass, wild flowers, and a few trees
up there, but I didn't come for the "nature."

My town was once a bank, a butchery, and a fire department
that sat on Route 30, ten miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. When I
was a kid, it was all still there, but there was also a Sheetz, CVS, and sev-
eral new housing developments. Every day, my parents and my friends'
parents walked out of the Custom Built Homes and drove an hour into
the city for work, and every evening they drove back. The hill I scaled
sat beside Route 30, and in the evenings I watched the sun set beside me
and the cars creep toward me as they drove home to the families they
had moved out to the country.

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