The Joys of Home Ownership

I grew up in a rowhouse in southern Brooklyn. When my husband and I got our first place it was the lower apartment in a two-family house in Queens, city of New York. We had a lovely landlady and lived in that place for 13 years despite the car horns, noise and cooking smells from the Greek neighbors and occasional gunshots. We were all jammed together.

We attempted to find a house we could afford several times but it was only after seeing a friend's condo that it occurred to us to find another apartment in an area less urban where we could keep a car. That led us to the small New Jersey town we live in now, another two-family house where we lived for 11 months and had the landlord from Hell.

Backyard, May 2015 (Margo D. Beller)

But we now also had a car and it was when MH decided to go down a small street he'd never traveled before that we found the house we wound up buying. We've lived here over 20 years.

I have yet to fully get used to the suburban lifestyle and mores after growing up in what geographically is considered "the city" but in reality was as much of a suburb as where I am now but with smaller plots. I do not understand paying someone to mow a lawn every week whether it needs it or not. (MH does our lawn every few weeks and it is greener than our neighbors', who get the dust on their lawns thrown up weekly.)

But what I liked immediately is that except for those times when neighbors had loud friends and families over to their backyard pools or patios, overused their leaf blowers or left their barking dogs out too long, this place is less trafficked, more quiet and, most important, my space.

The joys of home ownership.

Except when something goes wrong.

The picture above shows one such recent example. We went from a cold and damp winter in 2014 to a few days of spring in 2015 before a sudden jump into summer about a month early. Thanks to climate change, we have been dryer in this part of the country, although not nearly as bad as what is seen in the western U.S. But what I have noticed is we'll go weeks without rain and then there will either be a small, scattered shower in my area or a deluge, getting weeks of rain at once.

So the other week we got some rain for a few minutes for the first time in a long time. Then, during the night, there must've been another, stronger storm with high winds, and this hunk of maple was torn from the tree and deposited, luckily, in the corner of my yard, on the other side of the tree from my compost pile and my neighbor's swing set. With MH's help we got it to the curb and I used my lopper to cut it off smaller branches and make the pieces more manageable for our town to pick up.

It is a small price to pay for our space, as was discovering a problem with the foundation that needed fixing and having the roof fixed to stop the leak in the front room.

House wren box, 2015 (Margo D. Beller)

It is a snug, secure house unlike that of the house for the wren I put up every year. The first house, which was a decorative birdhouse I thought too small for any occupant, crumpled after five years. I bought the house above. After a few years of use I found it on the ground after the chain snapped, possibly because something bigger than a house wren was atop it. I repaired and rehung the house and it has been in use ever since.

Since house wrens will make a nest in anything, I think the house is more secure. But is it more secure than the usual bird nest, whether on the ground or in a tree? One year I discovered a pair of Cooper's hawks built a nest in a tree several streets away that I could see from a particular part of my back yard. But we had a storm that year and the nest came down.

I have come upon other nests by accident. There was the hummingbird nest, a tiny cup of grass, that was at the thin end of a tree branch hanging over Great Brook in the Great Swamp. There was the hole in a side of a large backyard tree that was used by a screech owl in winter but in summer was rented by a pair of redbellied woodpeckers. There was the catbird nest behind one of my shrubs - only my watering got Mamma Catbird to leave and I found the nest. (After that I watered far more carefully.)

More recently I have found a titmouse nest - a hole high up in a tree that was likely made by a woodpecker for a roost one year and then abandoned. As with the other examples, the nest was found because the bird directed me to it, inadvertently. But other nests do not become apparent until the tree and shrub leaves come down and the nest becomes visible.

Nests are basic structures. Their main purpose is to provide a place for a bird to lay eggs, brood them until young are born and then raise them to feed themselves before letting them go off and perpetuate the species. Those nests are temporary structures.

Our houses are too, but we forget this. They are built on land denuded of trees and so have nothing to shade or hold the soil of our lawns. Older homes are frequently expanded for "family entertainment centers" (in my house it is still a den). They are bought and sold with regularity, depending on the going price. They are the focus of zoning battles and fights over increasing property taxes, which in New Jersey are used to pay for schools.

However, if an errant tree comes down or a Hurricane Sandy hits or flooding rains bring water up to the first floor ceiling or if "the big one" hits, even these "permanent" homes become temporary structures, too.

Seeing the Forest for the Tax-Ratables

I may be wrong, but I believe in the office of every New Jersey county, town or state person in charge of creating or maintaining a park there is a manual.

Its title is something like “How to Get State Funding.”

Somewhere in the first chapter it probably says the following:

“To be able to maximize the greatest number of limited resources, the park shall be created to have the broadest number of uses.”

That means, if you want a park it can’t just have trees and perhaps a path or two. It must have an area for ball fields or a playground or a basketball court or soccer area.

It must be a “multi-use facility.”

That brings me to the Central Park of Morris County, and the clear-cutting of the trees.

Ever since the county (for $1) bought the land New Jersey no longer needed when the state was forced (by bad publicity) to close the old, hulking Greystone mental hospital and build a smaller, modern facility at the western-most end of the property, the county has been making improvements.　

One of the first things the county did was take down the abandoned stone buildings that used to house the inmates on either side of Central Avenue.

That was good. Those hulking buildings were dark and creepy, ghosts watching from the barred windows of the upper floors.

The buildings down and with all this land at its disposal, and all the time, effort and money expended to prevent trespassing, Morris County couldn’t just leave fields full of trees.

It started with a dog park, or “canine center“ as the county parks commission website calls it. I understand -- when you have a townhouse or condo or even one of the McMansions that have sprung up in the 20 years I've lived out here and your dog doesn’t have a big, fenced yard, you want a place to bring it.

Here’s what else is there, according to the website:

Two lighted, regulation-size, in-line skating rinks (that can be converted in summer for other sports). A baseball field for wheelchair activities. A 5K cross-country course.

That’s a lot of noisy activity on the south side of Central Ave., or “multi-use facility,” as it would be called in my hypothetical book. Not exactly the advertised “passive recreation” -- or hiking, as I call it.

Now the trees are down on the north side of Central Ave.

The north side of Central Ave. seen from Cottage Rd. The old hospital can be seen at the back.

I had hoped, fool that I am, the land would be left alone. The long grasses and very old trees had drawn wild turkeys, redtailed hawks, chipping sparrows, bluebirds, goldfinches, Eastern kingbird and others. I know because I hiked through that land and found them.

Now the trees are gone. The county has been cutting the trees for weeks. I’ve heard the sawing. I’ve seen the mountain of mulch.

Why?

What could the county NOW possibly be putting on that land between Cottage Rd. (the one that runs in front of the old administration building, which is state land) and the old hospital (currently under development; you can see it in the back of my photo)?

Soccer fields? A swimming pool? Maybe a condo village?

Who knows? I saw no notice of the county’s intentions anywhere.

I get it -- money is tight. If Morris County, one of the most built up in the most congested state in America, is going to create a park, it wants to get more bang for its buck. I think it did so.

I also think it should’ve created more hiking trails and left the trees alone.

But trees don’t pay taxes. Neither do the birds that nest and feed in them. It’s the same thinking that allows Parsippany to approve Whole Foods tearing down woods for a new store when there are half-empty storefronts throughout Morris County. In Livingston (Essex County) there is a completely deserted mall where the Borders used to be. Whole Foods could’ve had the whole thing to itself. But it wouldn’t have been paying taxes in Parsippany.

Or take Hanover, which allowed a developer to clear-cut property along Hanover Ave. for a shopping center, even though the nearby Cedar Knolls Plaza (formerly the Morris County Mall) and the Pine Plaza Shopping Center along Route 10, both also in Hanover, are half-empty.

You get the idea. Leaving woods alone is considered a “waste” of resources. Even my small borough is allowing 70 town homes to go up where a school used to be, which will make the Route 202 rush-hour traffic even worse since no one put in a traffic light for the residents to get into or out of the site.

Those park planners think they are giving us breathing room, and I suppose they are if you look at the over-development going on around us.

For those of us who think trees are important, there are still places to go. Some of these places are called National Wildlife Refuges.

They were created by the federal government with your tax dollars to protect the birds and animals that would otherwise be hunted to extinction.

To my thinking, they are also protectorates for trees, which in Morris County are also an endangered species.