Driving By Fields on My Way Home

I always slow down on the stretch of road that leads to my Sharon home. Right off the highway after passing Shaw's Plaza, I enter a place from the past. In the fall, a brilliant cranberry bog glistens behind trees along the road. Fields, long and wide, sprawl on both sides.

Depending on the season, I might see sunflowers or cornstalks, tomatoes or pumpkins. And though I can't see them from the road, the early summer fields are filled with rows of plump strawberries and blueberries. If I listen carefully, I can hear the message in the wind as it blows across the fields - "slow down, take a breath, smell the flowers, see the trees."

There wasn't such vast farmland near my childhood home in Bethesda, Maryland, but the little bit there was I will never forget. It was a small patch of pasture next to the road, home to the Black Angus cows. Though it's been almost 40 years since they've stood in the field, munching on their grass-suppers, swatting flies with their tails, I still think of them whenever I visit home.

They were there, even when cars went whizzing by. They were there, even when the new development went up across the street. They were there when it seemed impossible that they could still be standing there like that. And then one day I looked out my family's station wagon window to the grassy fenced-in field surrounded by progress, and they were gone.

The area near my family's home was always congested. Old Georgetown Road - the road next to the cows - was a main thoroughfare for residents in the northern suburbs of D.C., minutes from the Beltway and Interstate 270. Rockville Pike, several miles up the road from the cows, was littered with development - Arby's, McDonald's and Burger King, K-Mart, Penney's and Loehmann's. There were movie theatres and car dealers, an indoor roller rink and outdoor mini-golf. I think that's why I remember the cows. They were an anomaly, a beautiful remnant of country life suspended in the midst of vast suburban sprawl.

Once the cows were gone, the changes escalated. Townhouses were the first things to go in, and they went in just about everywhere. Years later, a road was bulldozed right through the cows' field connecting Old Georgetown Road to Rockville Pike, making a short-cut to White Flint, an elite mall with pricey boutiques and shops. More recently, other, even larger developments have gone in.

The latest was a group of million-dollar four-level mansions set yards apart with little land, no grass and few, if any, trees. It is funny how these developments, with their cleared forests and lack of green, always seem to have names connected with nature. The one across from the old cows' field is called The Oaks.

I've thought more and more about my childhood neighborhood as I've seen the recent changes in Sharon, the town that has been my home for over 17 years. There was the massive clearing of forest to make way for the Hunter's Ridge development on North Main Street, and now a proposed development on Norwood Street - Route 27.

Like the development near my childhood home, Pine Woods, with its planned clearing of trees in 26 acres, is also inaptly named for nature. I'm relieved that with the recent Town Meeting vote, initial steps have been taken to preserve our beautiful lakeshore property around Lake Massapoag, and I hope for the best when it comes up for a vote in the future. It would be sad to see fallen trees and built-up housing units and homes along one of my favorite running routes in Sharon.

The thing is, once something beautiful is gone, there's no turning back. When the trees are cut down, they are gone. When an open field is filled with townhouses and homes, it is gone. Forever. And life will never be the same. Like the cows in the pasture near my childhood home, the only thing left is a memory.


Whenever I visit Borderland Park, go hiking and snowshoeing in Moose Hill, or catch a glimpse of the cows in the pasture next to Crescent Ridge Dairy, I think how lucky I am to have all of this - the lake, the trails, the trees, the fields - in my hometown. It is a welcome refuge from the fast-paced, frenetic world that surrounds us. There is nothing more beautiful, or more peaceful, than driving by fields on my way home, sun setting in the distance.



(This column was originally published on townonline.com December, 2006)