Where I live.

The other day, Mike took his mom and I for a ride in his plane. I sat in the back seat with my 7-piglet digital camera and took some photos of the Wickenburg area from the air.

This is a photo of my house, taken from the southeast at about 2,000 feet above ground level (AGL to us pilot types). I circled my house so you could see it. So when I say that I live at the edge of nowhere, I’m not kidding. Our “neighborhood” stretches off to the northwest from our house. Most homes out there are on about 1.6 acres of land. Our immediate neighbors have 2.5 (like us) or 5 or even 10 acres. It’s a nice arrangement with plenty of spacing between us. No need to close the blinds at night. Lots of privacy. Space for our horses and chickens.

It bothers me that so many developers are trying to squeeze high density housing into Wickenburg’s available land. Most of the folks I know who came to Wickenburg five or more years ago (like us) came here because of the wide open spaces and loosely packed housing. It’s a quality of life thing. If you want to live on top of your neighbors, you can do that in any major U.S. city. Leave the outlying areas — the towns on the edge of nowhere — for the folks who don’t want their roof inches away from their neighbors’.

Of course, when a developer’s only motivation is squeezing as many dollars out of an acre of land as possible, he’s not likely to respect the wishes of the people who lived in the area before he came along and snatched up all the vacant land.

And what do the developers care about the quality of life when they’re not living in the urban sprawl they’ve created?

But it’s a crime when the elected officials of a town go along with the developer’s plans, despite the wishes of the people that voted them into office.

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.