Letter: Of bats and bees and a little house and yard
Last Fourth of July was pretty quiet. The fire danger was lower than the last few years, but still high enough to keep people from insisting on tons of personal fireworks. As twilight turned to night, the bats came out. More than usual, more than I’d seen in one place, though bats in flight are a bit impossible to count.
Bats flitting about above the yard, swooping on bugs and performing their crazy maneuvers. A surprisingly good year for bats and for other wild creatures, at least in the neighborhood. More native bees at the flowers, more hummingbirds, too. More birds in general, many types, including bluebirds.
Deer, of course, though they show up later in the year. Chipmunks, never seen chipmunks here before. Maybe next year a bat house and a birdhouse, set up where the dog won’t disturb them. Maybe in the front, where the xeriscaping has taken hold and where native plants, several of them dug up and transplanted from development sites before the bulldozers arrived, thrive. But there is no next year. This house and yard will be a development site very soon.
Multifamily dwellings are coming. Good for the area, housing is a problem. At least this development isn’t in a formally wild area. It’s not in the riparian zone, so near the waterways both we and wildlife need. A few recent developments have been a stone’s throw away from creeks and from the river that define our valley.
We sacrifice land for our need for housing. Leveling our home (and paying us well for it) is better than stripping land that has been left alone before. Still, the yard had just started to come together, the home was slowly getting fixed up. We had planned to live here for the rest of our days. Humble (and almost ramshackle) as the place is, it was ours and a good place for us and for several local species to coexist. Not wild lands, not even close, but wild compatible, in a comfortable, in-town, sort of way.
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We will, as mentioned, be paid. Happily, we owned this bit of land, due to the kindness of the previous owners and a few modest miracles. We will leave with enough money to get a solid new start on whatever comes next. There is no financial injustice in this case.
Still, a loss has occurred and there is sadness at leaving. There is some guilt too, at letting the critter-friendly yard with its native plants, old lilac bushes (not native, but grandfathered or maybe grandmothered in), chokecherry trees and a reasonably solid little 1950s house, be destroyed. This is an obituary, a requiem, to a place that we called home.
Kay Cochran
Eagle
