Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes...

The platitudes, metaphors and anecdotes about change are all around us. Almost to the point that we hardly notice them sometimes.

Change has always left me befuddled. Quick change is sometimes more pleasing, since you have no choice and no angst over coming to it. It is as it is and that is that. Slow change requires more thinking and analysis (at least in my feeble mind) but affords the luxury of acclimation.

All I know is that I fight the excitement that comes from change with the nervousness of it happening.


The street is wide. Wide enough for the trolley car that once rode down the middle and allowing space for the horses to travel aside. It is a bit of an oddity now in the neighborhood of narrow streets and close set houses. The map on the wall shows the street in 1870. A row of small wood multi family houses for workers and managers of the then 30 year old brick mills across the trolley line. Built by the same mill owner that lived a block away. The same mill owner that donated the land and money for the Congregational church to be built that would give the street its name.

Sometime around the turn of the last century, the houses were mostly cleared and it was simply a meadow reaching towards the river, one managers house remaining, the woollen and cotton mills churning out the product.

The Gothic spire of the puddingstone church held watch as a new set of houses were built. Fine new homes with running water, indoor bathrooms and central heat. Stylish in the neo-Colonial style popular in the 1920s, with a nod to the waning Arts & Crafts style. Nine of them, I think. Built mostly in pairs. Young families of the new immigrant workers would buy them. $6,000. for a new house, a bit of land and a piece of the American dream. They built their lives on the jobs in the mills nary 50 feet away.

These houses and their young families stood with the mills for another 30 years or so, until two new tudor styled houses arrived, with new families. Another decade or so until a small Cape Ann was built followed a few years later with two new Capes.

That was the neighborhood I was born into. We were the newcomers from 1964 until 1992. There was not a single change in those years. Children grew up and the parents grew old. The first generation passed and the children came home. As I grew, so did they, from the parents of my friends to elderly. Happy in their homes, tending flowers and watching the changes.

My neighbors told stories of coming to American on ships. They told of the first time they saw an automobile or plane. Most of them never knew electricity until they moved into their new $6,000. homes.

Slowly things changed, as is inevitable. Eventually one family sold their home to "outsiders". Then another couple died, happy as they could have been facing age and death, in their home. Their children sold, rather then come home. And then a third house changed in as many years.

Three years ago a piece of land had a house built on it. A large rental property. Another was demolished to make way for another rental/investment two family. The managers house overlooking the river was demolished last year to make way for a two family home the owner's wife refused to move into. Sitting empty for months and months, it was finally rented.

Soon the house on the other side will be demolished to make way for another multi-family. The owners are now to frail; one is moving to newly built elderly housing a few blocks away and the other beset with Alzheimer's Disease and unaware his home will be crushed. I fear it will be just another transient place for people to call home for a while before moving on.

The church is for sale. Its congregation long ago diminished and finally exhausted, it will make way for condominiums. The mills no longer produce thread or wool or jobs for the neighbors. They sit stoically as storage facilities, holding the possessions of countless people in transition.

The remaining houses are filled with the elderly, or quickly approaching that status. Their children are long gone, those that had them. Change will come to all of us, I know, but the difficulty in adjusting to it. Changes with are at the same time being slow and methodical, and yet quick and unrelenting, is wearing on me.

My own house seems to be holding the possessions of one in transition. Sadly I am not sure where I am to go. I am saddened by the loss of my personal perception of what my neighborhood was. I miss having neighbors that were invested and interested in knowing whom was next door, rather then those that lower their head and walk by you on the sidewalk. No reason to invest knowing me, I suppose, if you only plan to be here for a year or two.

I guess I don't necessarily even know if there are neighborhoods such as the one I grew up in, and lived for so long in. I know that home is a peculiar idea. Perhaps it is why we have a word in English for both house and home, unlike many languages.

It is not like I feel I lost my home, per se, but I wonder if home will still feel as much like home as I become lost in a sea of disinterested persons. Persons looking at me and thinking I am as disinterested, since I am likely a transient as well.

I like being part of community, in whatever form it comes. I think they are beneficial to us all. I miss my personal community that I enjoyed for so very, very long.