Change? Or Progress?

It strikes me every time I drive through Wylie how much it has changed in the last 10 yrs or so. The biggest change is turning down the road by the High School of off 544 and there is a building where their used to be a road! I have driven that road so often for the last thirteen years I know where the old road was and if you take it now there is a building you will drive into. Sunday I was in Wylie and left my best friends' house to go to her Mom's for a Scentsy party. I drove the long way winding around to look at my old neighborhood, the day care the boys used to go to, and the school where they both went to Elementary (which seems so long ago with B). The largest impact I can see is all the strip shopping centers down 1378. The road is horrible still 2 lanes full of pot holes and they are lining both sides with businesses you cannot get to now and once they get up and moving the same problem that the other two elementary schools of that road have, two lane road and everyone trying to get in and out and get past at all the same time. I feel for the people who will have to drive that road.

Anyways my meanderings took me down past downtown Wylie, and it struck me as how some of the older businesses in the little curve on Brown St have fallen into disrepair, and yet they are building new ones. The old frame houses on Brown and Ballard most are gone or they are changed into businesses. It is a rough time to open a small business and I am in favor of doing what you love and being able to get by in this economy, I just realized that the Small town homey feeling was gone. I noticed it even further at Brookshires. They were still friendly the store is still laid out the way it always has been. It just didn't feel the same.

But most of all I realized that the feeling that I realized was missing I realized I was not the only one. The employee who took my groceries out to my car said he had noticed the same thing and was thinking of moving back to Plano where he grew up because it was less expensive to live and he didn't like the missing homey feel either. His exact words were" I am going to live in a city that wants to be a big city I mine as well move to a bigger city that IS that way."

In 1997 when I moved to Wylie there was a big debate against the railroad, they voted them out and the Railroad came anyways. Then they fought against Walmart, ten years later it is there, with a hotel across the street. My point is, when we clear all the land for strip malls, shopping malls, stores, houses, and schools is it a good change, this so called progress? I am not so sure anymore.