THE NOISE!

This is the view today at our driveway. Look hard, that's a DUMP TRUCK just beyond the trees! Our once country road is being widened to a four-lane highway. This just grieves our hearts. When we moved here 30 years ago it was so quiet we had to buy a machine that makes wind noise so we could sleep. The house we sold to build had tire tracks on the roof from the airplanes landing at Atlanta Airport. Need I say more about that noise. We moved into an apartment for five month while building and the noise from the neighbors upstairs was bad--they wore concrete blocks for shoes and they only ran the dishwasher at 3:00 a.m. Then there were the parties and they couldn't understand why we didn't want to hear all that noise until the wee hours of the morning.

We then moved to our little piece of heaven on earth. Sad what we have lost. The Lord reminded me several days ago that, ... HE works all things out for the good of those that love the Lord and are called according to HIS purpose... (my paraphrase). We are believing the Lord is going to work all this our for our good, we don't know how or when, but we have to believe His word.

They are taking up the old road, grinding it up and all those dump trucks are hauling it off. I'm thankful they are doing this during the day. The paving process I DREAD. They start paving after dark and work until the wee hours of the morning. The low pitch of the engines drive me crazy--it actually hurts my ears and when the roller machines (my brother called them steam rollers when he was small) are working they actually cause our house to rattle from the vibration, that is obviously traveling along the ground. THIS IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!! The noise, the house rattling and vibrating, the dust, the noise, the house rattling and vibrating, the dust....

Last week, when DOT shifted the traffic to the new lanes further across the road, they weren't going to put down a cross over for US from our driveway to the new lanes, which has to cross the old road. Understand, they had one for all the other neighbors! I know this might shock you, but we have the phone numbers for DOT's Project Engineer and the contractor's Project Coordinator, so Hubby promptly called Richard and Kevin. He's on first-name basis with them, you know. They wanted us to use our neighbor's cross over, which meant we would have to turn left out of our driveway drive approximately 100 feet, then turn right, then make our turn onto the new lanes. NO WAY! We pointed out to them they were going to take up the old road, so we would be driving through the mud, if it ever rains. We have already experienced the joy of bogging down in the mud. That happened shortly after the project started. The huge pieces of equipment managed to quickly crush the pavement across their right-of-way, which was our access to the road! Then DOT put rock dust down for us to stop that problem. Then there was the mail box issue. We were going to have to jump a ditch to get to our mail box! NO WAY! That would really be GREAT for my artificial hip and Hubby's back!

They made us a cross over. :-) AND they moved the mail box for us and our post with our street numbers. All of this grief in the name of progress. Progress for who? Certainly not us! We loved our little two-lane road.