Sharon Blick

I stand looking at the almost bare piece of ground where I once lived for seven years. "Land Use Decision Pending," the sign says. "No," I think, "the important decisions about this land have already been made"--the decisions to remove almost every living thing, and to do it with heavy machinery in the winter when the waterlogged soil would be most damaged and compacted. I gaze sadly at the deep, slick gouges in the heavy clay soil, remembering the organic vegetable garden I once created and tended there, and how the soil gradually improved in texture and fertility each year that I worked homemade compost into it.

Did the people who decided what to do with this land know that the old Gravenstein apple tree they destroyed had produced the best tasting apples of any tree in the neighborhood? That in one year I had made eight gallons of cider and four gallons of applesauce from it? Did they know that that tree had once shaded a beehive from which I harvested twelve gallons of honey in one year? Did they know that the overgrown hedge they removed had once sheltered clouded salamanders and a California quail? That a sharp-shinned hawk had once caught a sparrow here? Did they think about the beauty of lilac bushes ten feet tall covered in huge purple blooms before they chopped them down? Would they have been surprised to hear that I saw twenty-five species of wild birds and five species of wild mammals living in this small city lot?