The wood at the bottom of the road is quite frightening. Even Pan would think twice about playing his pipes in such a dark, unwelcoming thicket. The trees seem huddled together, shivering in the wind, their crooked branches reaching into the sky as if trying to claw themselves out of the undergrowth, desirous of being elsewhere, anywhere else besides being rooted at the bottom of the road. But that's impossible now and so the trees have turned inwards, developed a sort of evergreen insularity that denies shade from the sun or shelter from the rain to their human neighbors, won't allow owls to perch in their hollows and irritably shakes squirrels from their boughs. Only fungi are welcome in the wood. In fact, for all I know, maybe the fungi are calling the shots here. After all, a simple mycelium brain is perfectly happy subsisting at the bottom of anything, never mind a two-way road that's recently been repaved.
Of course, once upon a time, this entire area was the wood. Then Josiah Pitman felled a few conifers and built his house. Ebenezer Gifford felled a few more conifers and built another house next door. And so on. Soon the only conifers remaining were the conifers at the bottom of the newly formed road. And I suppose those conifers have been afraid of being felled ever since, which is why they've become a vicious gang of thuggish trunks with body-armor bark, knuckle-duster roots and razor-sharp leaves. See how those crows keep their distance, preferring the relative safety of the power lines; how the windblown plastic bags evade getting snagged in the treetops by clinging to telephone poles instead. It's been like this for as long as I can remember and long before that no doubt.
Nevertheless, the wood, defined by developers as a vacant lot, is up for sale. Someone has plans for one of those fashionable cubist homes that look like life-size Lego blocks. It will be strange to see the bottom of the road filled with bright yellow electric light and the blue flicker of widescreen television. Perhaps it's all for the best. After all, the frightening wood serves nobody and Mother Nature herself has apparently forgotten it exists. A new house, despite its incongruous architecture, will at least be a genteel addition to the neighborhood and not the setting for some cautionary fairy tale. Although I suppose that very much depends on who comes to live in the new house. I do hope they don't ally themselves with the two or three vengeful trees which will surely survive the building contractor's axe. We don't want a frightening family collecting multiple rusting cars and overflowing garbage cans at the bottom of the road.
