I suppose I owe you a followup from the Big Scary Road-Paving Meeting from Friday evening.
I guess I began to suspect that things might turn out all right when Our Hostess, having called the meeting to order, noted that she liked to begin such things with a check-in with The Man Upstairs, bowed her head and began to intone some monotheistic platitudes. Not being a praying man myself, and feeling quite creeped out by her automatic assumption that none of us objected to beginning this entirely profane bit of business with a jolly grovel before Old Nobodaddy, I rolled my eyes, inhaled sharply through flared nostrils, and looked around.
At least five other people were doing exactly the same.
Turns out I didn't need to worry too much about my neighbors and selling out. A very large proportion of the Two or Three Assembled wanted nothing to do with this family's's obnoxiously self-interested desire to protect their idiotically sited home from road-dust. One particularly exercised bohemian indignantly told Our Hostess in so many words to plant a goddamned hedgerow and some trees like a sane person would.
Saving me from the task.
No one took any formal votes, but I believe the consensus that emerged was that this woman should go stick her asphalt millings in her ear, and that we should hold the County's feet to the fire on the matter of road maintenance -- there's no reason in 2005 that a dirt road should be as dusty as this one admittedly is. More regular grading, plus the addition of calcium chloride to the gravel which allows it better to retain moisture, should control the dust.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that came out of the meeting was the apparent common suspicion among the old-timers that the preponderance of dirt roads in northern Loudoun was Richmond's revenge for their ancestors' Union sympathies during the Recent Unpleasantness: When the time came for distribution of WPA money for public works during the New Deal, not a penny came for road improvement around Lovettsville.
Which, all things said and done, suits me just fine 70 years later.
3 comments:
Thanks for the update, Neddie. I was starting to wonder...
Another lesson learned: You aren't alone; you've got like minded neighbors. I guess it should be obvious to us - the sane - but the crazies, the gutless, and the selfish are seen in such great numbers these days.
boy i rarely take it as a good sign when things start off with some mumblings about goat sacrifice.
All's well in Endwell, though. That's what counts.
Although I was sort of hoping I'd get to mobilize the Bobby Lightfoot Terminal Disease Assassination Squad.
glad to see there were like minded folks there with you... I probably wouldn't have gone to such a meeting, as I have no great expectation these days of finding others as aghast as I to observe the keen sense of entitlement rampant among the McMansion target demographic. Indeed, I find myself wondereing whether it is at all prudent to be making public pronouncements such as this.
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