There Goes the Neighborhood

All around me there is construction going on..........or perhaps better put, DEstruction.  When I moved here twelve years or so ago the neighborhood was, how shall I put it?......well, pretty slumlike.  Eastport had not yet been discovered as a seaside attraction.  The town was mostly boarded up and many of the houses on the verge of falling down.  Eastport's location, far out to sea on the Canadian boarder, was the last outpost.  It was the farthest you could go and still be in the US.  The sardine industry that was once the reason for its existence was gone.  The fishermen who hung on earned a very modest living lobstering or fishing.  The house where I live was almost the last outpost going north.  Dog Island, now a wealthy  "suburb" for summer people, was wild with fields and woods.  I used to walk the dogs there, tripping through the underbrush to the cliffs above the ocean.  Now, I still walk the dogs there, but I feel more like I am in Beverly Hills.  The computer world has made it possible for wealthy business people to live anywhere, using their computers to run the corporate world. The houses are huge, their grounds are manicured.  There is little evidence of the acres of Lupine that bloomed there in the spring.  I won't say it isn't pretty because it is.  Some of the trees have been allowed to remain if they fit the landscaping.  There are man made ponds and trellises, flower gardens.  The beautifully cultivated vegetable gardens are surrounded by electric fences to keep out the deer.  (Don't get me started!)  I still miss the old Dog Island, though, and that end of Water St where it was wild.

This morning I took some pictures of the activity around my house.  The influx of the wealthy is no more evident than right outside my windows.  I couldn't really capture the atmosphere with a few snapshots, but there is construction everywhere.  The old houses are being completely repaired and modernized.  Additions, huge windows, and decks are growing out of the sides and roofs.  Foundations are being dug or replaced.  Those that have been completed are unrecognizable.  My own house, once the nicest in the neighborhood, is fast becoming a blight (particularly my chicken house and yard).  I moved here when it was almost a ghost town and I felt at home.  Even though I wasn't born here and therefore seen as "from away," I felt as if I fit in, partly because I was in a subgroup called the artists.  The polarization that has taken place since I've been here and my lack of contact with the art community has left me unattached.  I don't fit.