Sylvia's Journal

When my in-laws lived here (from the early 50s until my mother-in-law died in 1993) the house they lived in remained essentially the same. They moved from one side of the house to the other and made only one change, removing a wall to make their TV room bigger. That was all, in all these years.

I remember when we visited them, before 1993, this was a quiet neighborhood with only the sound of the foghorn, waves, and seagulls. We experienced this kind of quiet in Finland. Coming back was a rude awakening. For one, we have a construction project in our backyard. It already made for one noisy summer last year when the foundation and framing was done and continues to do so now. Masons cladded the chimney with fieldstones that had to be lifted onto scaffolding using a squeaky flywheel and cut noisily with a stone cutter, from early morning till the end of the afternoon. This lasted for weeks. And now that this is done people across the cove are building a new house in and on the rocks which has required blasting and now produces loud noises from big trucks that are being loaded with rock debris. And when the construction noises calm down there are the landscapers with their noisy and polluting gas-powered landscaping equipment, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. It is never quiet anymore.

This morning when I walked around the small peninsula where we live, I counted 7 construction sites and 12 houses that weren’t there, or didn’t look at all as they do now, when my in-laws lived here. I sometimes wished I could take my long-gone in-laws for a walk around the neighborhood and watch their expressions. 

I know what has changed. When Axel grew up here, most houses were summer houses and at that time, summer houses were for the summer, not requiring the same creature comforts as their rest-of-the-year homes. People who lived here all year round like my husband’s parents, weren’t wealthy. Now our neighborhood is populated all year round; properties are snatched up by people with much wealth who either pull down the old houses or renovate, leaving only the bare house frames intact.  For years now there hasn’t been a summer without some construction project nearby. On the day Axel’s mother died we got phone calls from real estate developers asking whether we were going to sell. We now have several real estate companies in town and construction companies, all running booming businesses, creating more wealth and more wishes for more and better.

Everyone seems to be bitten by the bug that whispers in our ears (“not good enough”) – even we are bitten by that same bug. All the advertisers and happiness gurus are telling us that we could be happier, if only we lose some weight, buy this or that, get new clothes, renovate our kitchen or bathroom, or meditate every morning.  I did the latter for 2 years and have stopped doing so. It didn’t make me happier or calmer.

Knowing that most people in the world are sleeping in hot and buggy places, without screens on the windows or air-conditioning, and millions don’t even have a home, I wonder how we could ever be dissatisfied with the beauty and abundance around us. If only we could be satisfied with what we have, rather than indulge in dreams about more and better.