Poor Marty Smith (the developer next door). He is forced to live next to riffraff like Ann and me, with all our compost bin, our giant mulch piles and hundreds of plants.
In building his giant house (see "Marty and his Macy's Day Parade Balloon"), he bulldozed the little bungalow next day and the eradicated all plant life except a huge Amur honeysuckle bush. He scraped and leveled the land, removing dozens of nice plants and everything else interesting (like a big old gatepost, which he had yanked up and sent to the scrap yard).
His house and concrete driveway cover every square foot of the lot, to the point that Arlington County so-called "Zoning Enforcement Office"delayed his moving in for two months and fined him a certain sum (he says $400K) to compensate the county for the loss of tree canopy . As a developer he knows how to work around the
Throughout this process he critiqued our style of landscaping in a very irritating way. "I saw a big rat out in your alleyway." (You're the one who drove it out of its home in Norma's shed. "Why do you have those piles of branches?" (It's called mulch-- Our approach is kind of the opposite of his).
He lives there with a somewhat younger wife and a toddler son. I have never had a conversation with him, in more than two years. I'll say "hi Marty, Isn't a beautiful day?" He looks at me with that predator's gaze, and falls quickly into silence, and duck back into his garage.
No comments:
Post a Comment