Flo and Friends by Jenny Campbell for October 15, 2020

Developers won’t be happy till the whole damn world is paved over, and the only green is in their pockets.

I used to live in a neighborhood called the Indian Village, with streets named after the tribes from whom the land had been stolen.

We used to invent names for future developments: SIlenced Pines, Former Glen, Erstwhile Meadows, Grove Perdu, etc.

A tale all too common.

Yes — every development in my area is named for what the developer destroyed. My favorite one is P*st Farm (name kept back for family privacy) — Huge, expensive clutter houses built on what used to actually be part of the P*st’s family land. The other is “Oak Grove Preserve” where not a single oak was preserved.

Sounds too much like a cemetery.

And all those trees in the “artist’s conception” of the development somehow never seem to get planted. Welcome to “Scorched Earth Acres”.

We used to own some rural property that had a seasonal creek (or hollow) with pheasants along the creek banks. Sold it to a developer who paved over the hollow, which drove out the pheasants. What did they call the subdivision? Pheasant Hollow, of course.

I wonder what they would call the TV show, Green Acres today?

In my old neighborhood, we used to have a very nice peach orchard. Now we have apts. (named after the peach trees) and no peach trees.