My post of yesterday has received a fair amount of favorable attention, and there is certainly more to say on this subject, so I will continue.

The particular development we live in was built in the late 1950s. A few years ago, I talked to a man, probably in his late 40s, who had grown up in this neighborhood as it was when first built. He told me that there used to be a sledding run from our uphill neighbor's yard, across ours, across our downhill neighbor's yard, and almost to the street. All the neighborhood kids used to use it. He told me that this went on until the former owners of our house built a pool, thus blocking the sledding run. (The pool was built in 1967 and rotted out about 10 years ago.) I was quite struck by this tale, perhaps even a little shocked.

I had assumed that the isolation of neighborhood children in their own yards was simply a function of the lack of sidewalks and the 1 acre lots. But clearly, other social forces were at work. The children in this neighborhood as of the time I heard this story (4 years ago) would never behave like that. Property lines had been made too meaningful.

What has changed? When these houses were built, they were surrounded by open fields. There was a beautiful lake you could walk to. (It's about 800 ft. from our property line; David's son Geoff, now 26, who grew up in this house, says he's never seen the lake.) There was an estate in ruins where there were the foundations of an estate house one could explore.

Children have very different ideas about real estate than adults. For children, any unclaimed open space is potentially the commons. Open space that doesn't have a KEEP OUT sign and that adults aren't using can become the commons. So, first off, this neighborhood had, I'd guess, about 30 - 40 acres of commons available to children, encompassing forest, streams, meadows, ponds and a lake, and ruins. On the street itself, there was very little traffic, since this would have been a dead end in those days. (There's still very little traffic, since we are not on the way anywhere. But much of what traffic exists comes in the form of heavy delivery and service trucks.) Over the 70s and 80s, the surrounding houses were built and people refocused their children's attention on backyard utopias with patios, pools, and playstructures.

The new houses that were built were bigger and fancier. Most of the neighborhood is built on 1 acre lots. Many of the newer houses, though on the same size lots, have a bigger setback from the street (so they have extremely long driveways) and smaller back yards. They are built as mini-estates. I have a copy of the Town Plan for Mt. Pleasant from the 1970s -- our mailing address is Pleasantville, but we live in the Town of Mt. Pleasant which also encompasses part of the Rockefeller estate. The town plan promotes the 1 acre yard as what should be the standard. It also spends more wordage on how the Rockefellers will do as they please with their land than it does on housing for the elderly. The subtext of the plan is that this area was intended to house many mini-Rockefellers on little private estates. On the other side of the block, where there are only fences visible through the woods, the estates are not so mini: immense houses on 10 acre parcels with key-card entrances. There is a playstructure in one of those yards, though I have never contacted them to ask if their kids want to play with mine. I don't expect I ever will.

Given that the idea was for us all to be mini-Rockefellers, the roads and placement of the houses are optimized to emulate the look of estate driveways, not for convenient pedestrian traffic from house to house. Trick-or-treating around here is exhausting. Many nearly streets don't go through in order that we not be on the way somewhere, which is fine. But no pedestrian traffic is provided for. A house two houses away with a child Peter's age is either a short hike through a patch of poison ivy, or it is a 3.3 mile drive. Poison ivy grows on disturbed land. When new houses are built, poison ivy grows around the periphery.

I have to stop now and wake up Peter so I can drive him 13 miles up to Bedford Village for art camp. Perhaps I'll continue this thread tomorrow.

MEANWHILE, one of the praying mantis egg cases has hatched out and we have several hundred baby mantids on hand. (One egg case remains unhatched.)