I must have some bad karma with John Deere. For the past ten years, any move I make into a new house or apartment is followed by the early morning churning, growling, and backup beeping of construction equipment.The City is widening the road outside our development and for the past two days I’ve been wakened by these lovely early morning noises. The road is only about 100 feet from our bedroom window. Ugh...After I moved into my 1914 penthouse apartment in Ventura in 1997, the owner of the apartment building at the back of our lane decided to renovate. That was miserable because it took at least six months and included jackhammers. Incessant… jackhammers… all.. day… long… It was summer in a California beach town and my bedroom windows opened onto the lane. Or, rather, they did NOT open that summer. The apartment had no AC, either. How I savored the evenings and nights after the construction crew went home for the day. And weekends! I loved the weekends, drinking coffee in the morning, sitting in bed reading the paper as the beach air wafted through the sheers.
In late 1999 I moved to Denver. Shortly after, the City started tearing up the small undeveloped stretch of real estate that separated my house from busy Sheridan Blvd. This time, it was the construction of an office building that destroyed my morning lie-ins.
When Nettl and I moved to Stillwater in the summer of 2000, we got a house on a quiet road that few people knew about. We enjoyed sitting on the front porch watching the fireflies, whilst deer, foxes, and rabbits peeked out of the cedar grove across the street. One family of rabbits nested under the holly bush in our front flower bed, and I’d gotten used to meeting the eyes of a beautiful fox late at night as I closed our downstairs blinds. And the sight of deer foraging for grass in the snow under the full moon was a picture my mind has stored away forever. I used to love watching the tortoises cross our lawn to get to the stream in the woods behind our house, and I was often wakened by the call of the cardinals in the cedars. Our bedroom window opened onto this road, and we fell asleep at night in absolute country stillness. All too soon, however, the commute group discovered that the road provided a quick thoroughfare from the evil Walmart corner to Jardot, which could deliver them to highway 51 without the inconvenience of traffic lights. It was like living on the interstate then, and quickly after, a contractor decided to eradicate the woods and the wildlife to build a blight of narrow, two-story cracker box student duplexes that sat a mere eight feet from each other.
Then we moved here, to a house considered to be in the country. The road outside our small neighborhood (only seven houses) has always been used by the pilots to get to the small community airport about two miles away, but that was no big deal. Even the airport has been welcome, with only an occasional private jet and the OSU team jet that flies out only when there is an away game. Hey, in a town like Stillwater, that’s reason to pull out the lawn chairs and wait for the show! But mostly, it’s the OSU pilot training planes, which Joel and I enjoy watching on Summer evenings from the lanai. Now, the military has discovered our little airport, and while I don’t mind the increased jet traffic, I do mind the widening of the road, which has already piqued the interest of commuters looking for a way around downtown traffic. Already, the ambulance sirens have increased, which I really shouldn’t beef about, I guess.
But the past two days have been full of construction noise, and getting in and out of our neighborhood is growing more and more difficult. I don’t mind city noise, but the heavy equipment really gets on my nerves.
Time for a second cup of coffee.
