Eve of Destruction

I began middle school in the fall of 1960, and I graduated from high school in the summer of 1965. I was a child of the Summer of Love, the Eve of Destruction and the Summer of Our Discontent (with my apologies to John Steinbeck). The Eve of Destruction was one of the anthems of the 60’s during the convergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the Free Love movement that culminated in Woodstock.

I was thinking about the Eve of Destruction today because I have seen Mulder almost every day for the past week. Today, he was napping on one of the outdoor dining table’s chairs under the back porch around 6PM. Later, after dusk, I saw him saunter across the front deck. I was thinking about the Eve of Destruction because so many homes on our side of the street have recently been razed to make way for new construction. These homes and their backyards, like our own, have been Mulder’s de facto habitat for years. These homes have offered places to hide, places to rest, and places to hunt.

This morning, a single-family ranch style home two houses South of our own was demolished and its detritus carried away in dump trucks. It took five hours to reduce the home to rubble. In another two hours, the rubble was scooped up and carried away. I’m sure that Mulder is aware of this. The house adjacent to that home is new construction only now coming to completion – the interior finishings are being installed, and it will probably be ready for its new family in another six to eight weeks. Mulder’s habitat in those two backyards is gone for now.

Maybe a third of the homes on our street have been demolished during our twelve-year retirement. The pace of demolition and new construction seems to have only increased during those years. The children of the 60s, my contemporaries, are aging and dying. The habitat of the foxes, armadillos, skunks, racoons, possums and squirrels continues to shrink. There is little that I can do about it but preserve the little space that we have to share with them.

Shit. 🙁