Peckerwood

Borrowed from myself and the Asheville Citizen-Times:

Take the full-page developer’s ad opposite the Saturday, March 24 editorial page and the letter, “Asheville not really as progressive as it seems.” Add rolling development and Asheville becomes Greenville, S.C. without the economy. Even Republicans there complain about the proliferation of traffic, subdivisions and strip malls. Development may be free enterprise but, like consumption, it’s also an addiction.

And they keep coming, smugly self-confident couples with all the most heavily-marketed accessories, and you ask them where they live and they tell you “Peckerwood,” and you ask where that is and they’re mildly indignant you fail to recognize they live in one of the most exclusive new subdivisions in town, another of those Disneyesque “communities,” the next one farther out from last year’s hot new development, on what was until recently old man what’s-his-name’s apple orchard now awash in cheaply-built million-dollar homes with matching mailboxes and an architectural theme carried throughout the bacterium-like maze of cul-de-sacs, with a sculpted greenway beside the channelized stream that wends along past the stone foundation of the old grist mill fondly remembered in the name of the gated community adjoining Peckerwood on the other side of the 10-foot high perimeter fence.