I have a recurring nightmare in which I return to my childhood home and discover that the wooded property that flanks it to the east–a couple square miles of scrubby ash and white pine–is being developed. In some versions of the dream the first McMansions have been erected. In others, I just find the crude construction roads, harbingers of the building to come.

This matters to me because it was my favorite playground when I was a kid. Then I grew up and now, although I still appreciate the pleasures of flipping over rocks to look for salamanders, I’ve discovered other pleasures as well, like well-stocked supermarkets, and an art museum close enough to easily accommodate after-school visits.

And so my ideal, now, is to somehow combine the two: to somehow partake of the best of both rural and urban pleasures. This sensibility is captured in an article I found today on sprawl, by Robert Bruegmann in The American Enterprise Online:

At the turn of the century, it was primarily wealthy families who had multiple options in their living, working, and recreational settings. An affluent New York banker and his family could live in many different communities in the city or its suburbs. They could summer in the Adirondacks or at Newport, winter in Florida or on the French Riviera. They had the luxury of ignoring their neighbors and choosing their friends elsewhere.

Today, even the most humble American middle-class family enjoys many of these choices. The privacy, mobility, and freedom that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society are now widespread. So if the question is, “Why has sprawl persisted over so many centuries and accelerated in the modern era?” the most convincing answer seems to be that growing numbers of people have discovered that it is the surest way to obtain the rich, satisfying life all citizens crave.

So there you have it. When we accumulate a bit of money, we often spend it by moving into a relatively rural area–or buying ourselves a second home in a rural area. Which means someone else may return to her childhood home and find that her wooded playground is gone.

Is it fair to claim my woods is more important than someone else’s dreams of a rural getaway?

No. It seems to me the answer is “no.”

It also seems to me that steeped as we are in time — and in the constant chipping away at anything resembling permanence that marks time’s passage — we often try to cling to things, to force them to remain “as they always were.”

But that ties us into knots.

We have to let go. Painful as that can be, sometimes.