There's No Place Like Down Home

Battle Creek

Progress Exacts a Price

I'm a native! Saying that has quite a bit of meaning to me, since there are few of us left in Southern Maryland. My home has been Calvert County for the entire 39 years of my life. It has been a place that I have loved and have never, until recently, given any thought to leaving. I miss the Calvert I knew and long for the day that will never be again.

I want those who come here to know what they missed and to understand that the very things that draw them here will soon be, if not already, gone. The attraction of country or waterside living, and a slower pace of life, has quickly disappeared. I guess it would have to in order to make room for the shopping centers, expanded roadways and the numerous houses being built. Who would have ever thought that Calvert would need traffic circles or four-lane intersections! Certainly not the child in me who remembers when Calvert had a two-lane road paved not in blacktop, but tar and gravel. The county was beautiful because it was full of fields, as far as the eye could see, that were filled with golden corn and tall tobacco.

I remember the excitement when the first traffic light for the southern end of the county went in at Dares Beach Road, because the Safeway had just opened. I suppose I'm as guilty as the next person who got excited about progress, because there was the feel of a real adventure in the back seat of my father's old green Impala as we drove the 20 miles north to shop at the Safeway for the first time. Believe it or not, there was nothing but farms from Woodburn's store in Solomons and Buehler's store in St. Leonard to that brand-new Safeway in Prince Frederick. Thinking back, that was probably the start of the end of the way of life I knew and the beginning of more people, traffic and buildings than I ever could have imagined as a young child.

Unfortunately, our county is relying on the old saying, "If you build it, they will come." But my question is: Come to what? With fields now filled with housing developments instead of crops, highway expansions taking what is left of the scenic roadsides and no public access to water, what is there for people to come to that doesn't exist in the places they are moving from?

I'm not sure what comes first, progress or people. But one thing is sure, Calvert will never be what it was. Once upon a time, it was a great place to live.

Brenda DiCarlo

Dowell

Amid Peacefulness, Invaders

In spring 1979, the first year that I lived in Lower Marlboro, Calvert County, I turned up a spearhead while working in the garden, proving that others before us loved this place, too.

I love the creatures of Southern Maryland and the never-ending delight they bring to us.

And the Patuxent River is a constant source of peacefulness.

Three years ago, putting bags away after a vacation, I found an opossum staring at me from the floor of our closet. I carefully closed the door and retrieved our Havahart trap. (When you live in the country, you own this kind of thing.) By the time I got back, the opossum had disappeared.