A Little Story Repeated Everywhere

A number of communities went through painful degeneration during that deep recession we were thrown into 8 years ago.  Even my little bit of a neighborhood was touched by this.  I remembered this while taking a walk around last week on a warmer spring day.  All of the homes in my neighborhood  are on 4 acres or more of woodland because the county was hoping to protect the waters by using limited development, and required this much land for a permit to build.  So this place is pretty rural.

If I walk to the end of my driveway and look to the right, this is what I see.

It is a little less than a mile to the main road in that direction.

This is what my driveway looks like if I am coming home.  Note the lovely landscape bed to the left that reflects we have deer!

Here is the gang hanging outside the tennis fence at my neighbors fancy house.

Above is the house of another neighbor who owns his own landscape company.  So, of course, his lawn is perfect.  He resides down at the cul-de-sac about a half mile in the opposite direction of my driveway.  (Note even he has plastic flowers under the mailbox because of the deer!)

Yes, those yellow flowers at the base of the mailbox are plastic and not spring daffodils.

This family that lives here has a very fancy entrance and actually won a lottery years ago!

The entrance to my "next door" neighbor's house is not so fancy.

But if we walk up to the main road we come to this house.  This is the house that has a sad story and I will write about that in my next post.