The Electron picks up momentum again as I have returned from New England, where I was visiting my parents in Massachusetts.

The neighborhood I grew up in has a fascinating recent history which is quite unusual for modern America. In the early fifties, developers clear-cut a whole forest and leveled the top off a hill in order to build a large development of one-story ranch houses. This is not the unusual part; after World War II, housing developments sprouted up all over the country. My family's house was built in 1954-55, on land that was reduced to an unnatural prairie. It was so open that the rare Horned Lark which nests on the ground in arctic meadows, nested there. Near the houses were spindly saplings of hardy trees like maple and less hardy trees like weeping willow, Chinese elm and yellow poplar. There were also rows of tiny conifers, and as a child I planted little pine trees which were no bigger than I was.

As I grew up, that yard was a softball sandlot and a Frisbee court; it was even open enough to fly kites there. The cherished Eastern Bluebird was persuaded to nest there, in a box in our back yard, as late as the 1960s, when meadow conditions still prevailed.

But as time went on, the trees grew large. The hardy maples and evergreens survived, while the elms and willows eventually perished. Fifty years later, the little spindly trees and the cute Christmas-tree evergreens are big forest trees, and the northern jungle of New England has returned to create a deep shady forest environment around a ranch house whose architectural ancestors were designed for open prairies. Wild underbrush has taken over my old playgrounds, and deer wander through the land, munching gardens. My old home is also home to a cartoon wonderland of little woodland creatures, such as grey and red squirrels, big-eyed chipmunks, saucy skunks, big burly bunnies, Pogo possums, and lots of mousies, as well as the occasional clever fox or wiley coyote. The meadow birds are long gone, replaced by noisy bluejays, nuthatches, cardinals, chattering wrens and woodsy woodpeckers, as well as a swooping hawk now and then who comes to do some un-cartoonlike hunting and grabbing at the bird feeders.

The unusual thing about this is that my old neighborhood is one of the few places in America which seems to become more rural with time, rather than less. Perhaps this is an illusion, since an endless garish strip of malls and shopping centers and American commercial sprawl is only a mile or two away. But at my old home, the woods that were so insensitively destroyed in the 50s have returned, part of the reforestation of America.

My parents moved into their home when it was freshly built in 1955. They are still there, and still married to each other since 1945. This in itself is an example of social stability which will probably never happen again in our society, except for a few rare cases.

While I was there in that dark green world I picked up my College Algebra book, which was written and published when the horned lark could still nest in my neighborhood, and began my study of Logarithms. I'll have more to say about the book, and logarithms, in my next Electron entry.

This Electron Blue nostalgic moment is dedicated to the memory of Father Robert Bullock, my beloved mentor who passed away on June 20 at the age of 75.

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