Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The End of Privacy As We Know It

This is the entry into our beautiful home in the country in Rhode Island. We bought this home five years ago in an attempt to get away from the noise and bustle of the city, having lived in Providence on the east side for years and Mount Pleasant across from the High School for five years. Our neighbors were always too close, too loud and way too visible for our liking.
This wing of the house is on the left side and houses all the bedrooms. Bedrooms are usually where you want the most privacy.
Next to that wing you can see our yard delineated by the mown lawn. Beyond that are the woods from the vacant lot next door. The previous owners of our home owned this piece of land, 160 feet wide, situated between us and the Browns property. We knew they had the land on the market and were asking an exorbitant price for it. We couldn't afford their asking price, nor could the Browns. We never thought he'd sell due to his greed, his immovable desire to get his price for the land.
Take a good look. All this will be gone in the matter of a few weeks as someone has bought the land and they are clearing and building a house on it. The deer, turkeys, hawks, rabbits, fox, and coyotes better have a back up plan because they will no longer be able to use this piece of land to live, or cut through to the deeper woods behind us.
If you take a really close look you can see the yellow 'dozer sitting at the entrance which they just cut out of the hundreds of years old wall fronting the property. And of course, you can't hear them felling the trees with their chainsaws which is happening as I type. I'm hearing the trees go down one by one. We have no idea if they will leave any on the border of our properties. All the trees are on their side of the line. I'm having this uncontrollable panic-filled need to call a nursery and order about 50 junipers or arbor vitaes to line the edge of our land for privacy!

And then of course is the yet unspoken issue of the new neighbors, who we have no idea who they are, and there being people living too close again, too noisy, too visible, too loud. I really don't want to move again. I love my new kitchen, all the wonderful windows and sliders and my sunny and large studio, which will now probably look out onto their back deck only about 25 feet away.

More buzzing noise - another tree down. Oh, how I wish someone would just make it all a bad dream so I could wake up.

2 comments:

  1. Oh, I'm so sorry! Your property is lovely. I know you (and the wildlife) will miss the wooded lot. Hopefully the new neighbors will leave a buffer of trees and won't be nearly as bad as imagined.

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  2. So far they have left a thin layer of brush and trees at the edge, but they are nowhere near done clearing. We're going to the beach for 4 days, not sure what will be left when we get back! Thanks for the commiseration Dawn, we'll get by, it just sucks.

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