Relay: Slowdowns And Teardowns

This has been a rough winter for my husband and me, even though we’re 1,100 miles south of the snow, and it’s been made no easier by reports from Amagansett of big changes in store for the quiet street we’ve lived on for — whoa — one year short of 50. (Like Jack Graves, I may soon be reading my own words in the “Years Ago” column.)

With Sidney pretty much incapacitated since late December by a serious accident, we’ve had to confine our usual comings and goings to staying put, and while spending most of your waking hours within circumscribed limits is infinitely more bearable here in Florida, where the sun sets an hour later and the only ice is in your glass, than it would be up north, it’s not at all what you anticipate when you pack your flip-flops.

So we are looking forward even more than usual to April, when, with his usual determination plus intensive therapy, he should be, if not what you’d call nimble, at least able to negotiate the trip home.

What we will find upon arrival, though, is iffy. I had a call from a real estate broker last week who’d been studying the tax maps and wondered if we’d care to sell a buildable piece of land that Sidney presciently split off long ago from the rest of our flag lot. It turns out that the people whose yard backs onto that vacant parcel, and who have been our good neighbors from the beginning, are moving to where their kids live and selling their house.

Meanwhile on the other side of us, I’m told that a house only 10 or so years old was recently demolished (“I had heard that when the house was sold she specified that it not be torn down,” a friend lamented in an email), and the one next to it, an immediate neighbor’s, is almost certainly about to be.

Oh, dear. Bulldozers to the west of us, bulldozers to the east, volleying and thundering, and who knows how many mini-estates coming to the south, where we have been blessed all these years by a full-on view of someone else’s vast empty meadow.

Our three children grew up spending summers in Amagansett and they love to visit, but they all live so far away that expecting them to keep the old house going after we’re gone is folly. It will be a teardown. There, I’ve said it.

As I said, the winter has been hard. I wonder whether, were it not for the accident, with its intimations of mortality, I would be fretting so much. We’re not selling that vacant parcel just yet, though.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large at the moment in Key Biscayne, Fla.