Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

junkyard. In fact the Kinsmen had recently drained and cleared a waste area by the river and turned it into a very nice park, something the town had been lacking in its entire hundred years. She understood that Dutch elm disease had wiped out all the elm trees in Europe during the last century and had been making headway across this continent for fifty years. God knows the scientists had worked hard enough looking for a cure. She felt compelled to point all this out. Jeanette smiled wanly, yes, but you don’t know what’s happening, it’s everywhere, technology and progress are destroying the quality of life.
    Well
, thought Dorothy; she had forgotten what a black view Jeanette always took and how it always annoyed her and drove her to defending things she supposed she knew nothing about and had no business defending. Quality of life. She did not think in those terms or talk to people who did. Jeanette was a problem to understand.
    “She has that lovely car,” Viola had said, “and she has her education and her job and nobody to spend her money on but herself, and she has been all over—wouldn’t it have seemed like a dream to you or me—and yet she isn’t happy.” Viola of course thought that Jeanette was unhappy and embittered because she had failed to get some man to marry her. Dorothy did not think that, and she was not sure that embittered or even unhappy was the word to describe what Jeanette was. Adolescent was the word that came to her mind, but that did not explain enough.
    Dorothy herself as a young girl—she remembered this clearly—had flung herself down in the grass beside the lane of the father’s farm, howling and weeping, and why? Because her father and her brothers were replacing a fence, a crooked old mossy rail fence, with barbed wire! Of course no one paid any attention to her protests and in time she got up and washed her face and got used to the barbed wire. How she hated change, then, and clung to old things, old mossy rotten
picturesque things
. Now she had changed, herself. She saw what beauty was, all right; she acknowledged the dappling shadows on the grass, the gray sidewalk, but she saw that it was, in a way, something to get round. It did not matter greatly to her. Nor did familiarity. Those houses across the street had been across from her for forty years, and long before that, she supposed, they must have been casually familiar to her, for this town had been Town to her when she was a child, and she had often driven along this street with her family, coming in from the country, on the way to put the horse in the Methodist Church shed. But if those houses were all pulled down, their hedges and vines and vegetable plots and apple trees and whatnot obliterated, and a shopping center put up in their place, she would not turn her back. No, she would sit just as now, looking out, looking not emptily but with strong curiosity at the cars and pavement and flashing signs and flat-roofed stores and the immense, curved, dominating shape of the supermarket. Anythingwould do for her to look at; beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be discovered. This was a feeling that had come on her as she got older, and it was not at all a peaceful, letting-go sort of feeling, such as old people were supposed to get; it was the very opposite, pinning her where she was in irritable, baffled concentration.
    “You don’t look as if you’re thinking very pleasant thoughts,” Viola had more than once said to her. “Pleasant thoughts keep you young.”
    “Is that so?” said Dorothy. “Well. I’ve been young.”
    With the trees gone it was possible to see as far as the corner of Mayo and Harper Streets. Dorothy saw Blair King coming around the corner, walking home from work. He worked at the radio station, which was only a couple of blocks away. Like most of the people who worked at the radio station he was not a native of this town and in a few years would probably move on. He and his wife rented the house next to Dorothy’s, but his wife was not there now. For several weeks she had been in the hospital.
    Blair King paused to look at the out-of-province license plates on Jeanette’s car.
    “That belongs to my granddaughter visiting us!”
    Why had she called out that? She and Viola did not know the Kings well; they never visited back and forth. He was friendly enough, in what seemed a half-professional way, but she was cool. They did little work