… at the office…
On-site amenities [at a new building across from UD’s office] will include a Citibank branch, Roti Mediterranean Grill, Sweetgreen and Circa. A much-anticipated Whole Foods will open by Sept. 1.
… and at home. (UD reflects on her neighborhood.)
Garrett Park, Maryland, a town near Bethesda, is deceptive, especially if you live, as we do, near the CSX train tracks. From our small house, surrounded by woods, the world looks rural, not suburban. And forget urban.
We’ve got over a half-acre of lawn and trees, on which deer, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and a zillion other animals thrive. This time of year, with the spring blossoms, we can barely see neighboring houses. And because there’s only one through-street in Garrett Park, little traffic passes by our split rail fence and unmanicured lawn.
Yet this sylvan scene has more to do with strategic barriers and bluffs than with reality.
The train tracks themselves represent one such borderland. The end of our land is an abrupt thirty-foot drop into the narrow canyon of the tracks, and on the other side of that canyon, hidden by kudzu and all sorts of other growing things, lies quite-built-up Randolph Hills.
A park jammed with mature trees hides from our house the madly popular Black Market Bistro, which brings lots of cars to the streets of our town. However crowded the restaurant, though, the cars never reach our property.
As for the sound of trains near our house: I grew up in Garrett Park and don’t really hear them.
And anyway, lonely train whistles are echt rural.
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When, a few days ago, my husband and I were shocked out of sleep — out of that particular night’s sleep and out of the larger placidity of Garrett Park — by a big explosion, I assumed something terrible had happened to a train. The tracks vibrated massively in the aftermath of a blast I figured had to do with a catastrophic chemical accident. Afraid of what might have been released into the air, I didn’t throw on clothes and explore. Instead, I waited for sirens, which started up two minutes after the boom. And then I went back to sleep.
The morning’s news about the Randolph Hills house just across the tracks that we’d heard splinter into nothingness was another reminder that to live in Garrett Park is to inhabit a very tenuous tranquility, a shaky small-town life in the midst of the city. The quiet wild greenery of Garrett Park is itself manufactured: It represents the legal and political accomplishment of generations of savvy, feisty townspeople who’ve kept roads closed and trees replenished and McMansions out. They’ve kept our no-home-delivery post office going, an arrangement which means that we take walks and meet our neighbors every day, just the way they do in the boonies.
But the Garrett Park post office is imperiled. Post offices are being closed all over the country.
And ceaseless smart growth near the Grosvenor metro encroaches more and more on the town.
The exploding house across the tracks, then, wasn’t a wake-up call, because everyone here knew, before three AM the other night, that a large noisy world was right out there beyond the barricades. The exploding house was, instead, another of many reminders that small-town Garrett Park, Maryland, while not a fiction, is an increasingly implausible story-line.