Reading: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card.

Little Boxes, All the Same

Driving to work to pick up Tab today, we passed a large, empty lot that up until now had been overgrown with trees and brush. Today, however, there was an excavator in the process of clearing the lot: some of the trees were down already, and the lot had taken on a trampled, bedraggled look.

"Look, Mama," Daniel called.

"I see, Dans. I wonder what they're building here."

"Maybe a house."

"Maybe. I hate to see those trees come down, though."

"It's just the Circle of Life," said Daniel, philosophically.

I laughed, but then I sighed for another empty lot gone. Green space here in central New Jersey is disappearing at an alarming rate. Within the past five years, several of the farms we used to pass along our route to Princeton have been sold and are now being turned into housing developments: little boxes made of ticky tacky, in the words of Malvina Reynolds's song.

When I was in high school--can it be? more than twenty years ago?--my boyfriend and I often drove up Route 1 from Trenton to New Brunswick to make deliveries for his father. In those days, there wasn't much besides farmland between Princeton and South Brunswick. Now that stretch is filled with strip malls, office complexes, and housing developments.

Sometimes, particularly after reading one of those post-apocalyptic, SF novels of which I'm so fond, I wonder how long it would take for all of it to disappear. If human beings suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, how many years or centuries would it take nature to reclaim its own? Any homeowner can tell you that nature is constantly attacking our constructions: ants in the kitchen, weeds infiltrating the lawn, deer breaking through fences. But how long would it take for every sign of human beings to be eradicated? Over time, roots would break up sidewalks and roads, while flood waters would destroy foundations. Eventually buildings would collapse, their remains shrouded by trees, descendants of those trees that were destroyed when the buildings were constructed.

And that, my friends, would be the true Circle of Life.

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