One day ours will be a quiet little street with green lawns, neat flower beds and young trees reaching skyward.
But not for a while yet. I write this from a rocking chair on the front porch on a Monday morning, and Double Eagle Lane is a bee hive of activity, has been since just after 7. Fortunately, I am an early riser and enjoy the morning quiet with a cup of coffee before the buzz begins.
A TRUCK RUMBLES by with a load of lumber, rattling the windows. Across the street, workers are swarming over what will be the homes of new neighbors. They are putting the finishing touches on a house across the street. Next to it, a framing crew is getting ready to erect walls and next to it, what was a vacant lot only a few weeks ago now is a house with shingles and siding.
When we left town a couple of weeks ago, another house diagonally across the street had just been framed up. Today workers are installing trim and are hauling shingles up to the roof.
One lot over from us, a slab has been poured, and the framers will begin there soon.
That leaves empty lots across the street and next door to us. A friend and former neighbor has the one across the street; she hopes to have a house finished by the end of the year. There are vacant lots farther up the street, but when work on them begins, it will be much less visible.
AT THE MOMENT, it is like I am sitting on the front row of a ballet with the music by Strindberg or Bartok. There are no woodwinds nor strings. A forklift unloading lumber from a truck provides a bass note, while its backup beeper counts time. The percussion comes from nail guns and hammers, and screaming saws hit the high notes. The small gasoline engine that lifts shingles to the roof hits a note just a shade up the scale from the forklift.
Workers calling to each other are the chorus.
We moved to National Village a little less than a year ago from Lake Martin. I greeted the mornings there in silence, watching the sun light the top of the ridge across the slough. On Sunday evenings, after the weekenders had departed and the boats disappeared, we sat on the deck, watching the stars appear and listening to nature’s background music.
I DO NOT COMPLAIN about the noise or the dust—at least not much. The lots around us were vacant when we built, and we knew that you can’t build houses without noise and dust and mud, and we look forward to seeing new faces. Meanwhile, we are living in the middle of a documentary on home construction, and we have given names to some of the continuing characters, the Lone Ranger and Tonto being just two of them.
Mornings here are lovely, too, and the cacophony eventually will disappear.
Meanwhile, I am just an observer of the spectacle.
Bill Brown, a retired newspaper editor, lives on Double Eagle Lane in National Village.
