Brookberry in the News

As some of you may know, I maintain a site that documents the happenings of Brookberry Farm. I saw today on journalnow.com that the beltway that is supposed to feed this development has been put off for about 8 years now...

"City leaders in Winston-Salem began talking about a loop in 1962, after
the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring all urban areas with a population
greater than 50,000 to have a coordinated transportation plan."

I remember having the red tape behind our house on every other tree while surveyors determined which route would take out the fewest houses and facilitate the best traffic flow. The tags were hanging as close as our back porch. It was a very scary time, wondering if we would have to leave our rental home of 10+ years and search again for a place to stay. We argued at the town meeting, wrote letters, and begged anyone who might have power to let us stay.

We knew there would be casualties. We knew if route 'B' wasn't chosen, the folks on route 'A' would have to pay. Sometimes it would make me so mad, as a young child, that if we were spared someone else's home would be demolished - not to make way for a bigger house, or a new community center, but for a road. A large, noisy, polluting highway, to be exact. They named it The Beltway, and I've hated it since.

As you can read from the articles on my site, (which is always under construction, ironically enough) the road from large family farm in rural Forsyth county to the bustling development that it will become has been a long one. The beltway had inadvertantly preserved one small section of the farm from housing, separated it from the rest of cluster. This part was preserved, in the planning process, for the Beltway, which would bring more traffic to the area without increasing the traffic on a small, 2-mile-long road named Meadowlark Dr. (Which, I must add, has had 3 new housing developments added in the past 10 years, along with a new school that is almost at capacity already, but I digress.)

Now, the Beltway timeline has been pushed back farther. The state has long since bought the land that was needed, and it sets idle. No laughing children, no farmers plowing the ground, no apple pies sitting on the window sill.

Deadness.

Emptiness.

Sadness.

And, even though the land is now peaceful and quiet, it is merely the eye of the storm. The foreboding feeling is felt everywhere, a collective 'holding-our-breath', waiting for the bottom to fall out, and watching all the simplicity and rural community of western Forsyth County disappear forever.