Category: Development

Welcome to Emanon

The thing about development is it never seems to work out as well as it was planned – except for the developers. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not opposed to growth. I enjoy, for instance, trees large enough to make shade on a summer afternoon, and creeks wide enough to have pools for swimming. My favorite growth is the fish that grow larger each time I remember them.

Human population growth, on the other hand, has some drawbacks.

Life was good for many years in Emanon. (All names are fictional to protect the storyteller.) Herons and osprey hunted the creek, and people generally enjoyed living here.

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Racist weeds in a conservationist garden

Most of the men – and they were mostly men – I looked up to back in the day have turned out to be racist. Or misogynistic. Or both.

George Washington, for instance, was the Father of Our Country, though I was suspicious even then of the story about him being unable to lie? I know no young person who could not, when pressed, cultivate an untruth to some degree.

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Happy New Year! The future is just over the horizon

Time is merely a construct to aid cataloging significant events. As a kid, time began when I was about 12-years old. That was the year we built the big house.

As I look back through my anthology of stories from that era, building the house was not significant because it meant heating with oil (no more splitting and stacking wood for the stove) or ending the practice of heating kettles of water for the wash tub (hot water poured from a faucet to fill a real bathtub).

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Sparkling diamond dust and summer sausage

The moon the past few nights, when we could see it at all, has been amazingly bright, like a humongous spotlight angling through the trees, casting stick shadows across my desk. The grass between my home and the woods is sparkling, as though a troop of elves has danced across the greensward scattering powdered diamonds.

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Hard cider and wilderness

More than 100 members of the South Mountain Partnership gathered Friday to celebrate “the Power of Partnership” in preserving and marketing the South Mountain Region. The gathering was held Friday at the Hauser Hill Event Center, in Franklin Township.

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The cost of irrigation

It’s amazing how quickly things can change. Like when you have 45 minutes to get to a meeting so you decide to take a quick look at your email, and find yourself 15 minutes late.

Land development is like that. Twenty years ago, there was one traffic light on York Road – at the Walmart – on the York Road commercial district east of Gettysburg Borough. A few years later, there were six. The Giant had moved from in-town, where it was walking distance from many residents, to out-of-town, where it wasn’t.

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Water pollution is like a virus

Wednesday, California became the first state to require all school staff to get vaccinated or agree to regular testing. President Biden has said maybe federal employees can avoid being vaccinated if they are willing to be tested regularly for Covid.

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Hawks and people need green space and water

A Red-tailed Hawk sits patiently waiting for dinner to show itself.One of the many wonderful things about living where I live is I am not required to travel far from my home to see wonderful stuff. Like on the recent afternoon when I went driving with a fellow photographer along a nearby road and found four Red-tail hawks in the space of about a half mile.

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