After Alice by Karen Hofmann Page B

miles the sweep of the east shores, the pine-topped hills, the fans and rectangles of fruit trees.
    But it is all altered. Where the little village along the highway had seemed only slightly changed, this slope above the lake has changed alarmingly. Dozens, hundreds of new houses have sprung, toadstool-like, from the ground, eating away at the meadows, the pine brush, and even, here and there, at the orchards themselves. And what she has taken to be orchard, she sees, is actually something else: not the dotted rows of trees, but the wavy lines of vine plantings. Fully two-thirds of the orchards along this ten-kilometre slope, she judges, have been turned into vineyards.
    â€œSo much new development,” she says to Walt and Jack. This — crowding — is unsettling, threatening. Who are all of these newcomers, pushing up their clusters of new houses where her memory plants woods, meadows? But what has she expected? Everywhere the cities are spreading to the countryside, the old villages taken over by new houses.
    â€œMust be a real change,” Walt says.
    Yes.
    â€œThe orchards are hanging on, most of them,” Walt says. “ALR keeps that going. A lot switching to grapes, of course.”
    Again, the half-look, the almost imperceptible signal between Walt and Jack. Some conflict between them, maybe? Walt’s thirty acres, with its heave southward, would be good for a vineyard. Maybe Jack is pushing to switch. Well, she’ll find out soon enough.
    All changed. The proliferations of new houses, the breaking up of the orchards. Why is this upsetting to her? She has not lived here, has chosen to live elsewhere, for nearly fifty years. She is not, in principle, opposed to change, to development. People have to live somewhere.
    It is the evidence the changes give of newcomers, of strangers moving in, appropriating what she had thought was hers.
    But what had she thought was hers?
    â€œBeauvoir is still producing,” Walt says. She notices, with pleasure, that Walt uses the old name, pronouncing it the old way: Beaver .
    She remembers the great orchard estates of her childhood: Eagles’ Rest to the north and west, Robinson’s Dingle to the south, San Souci north and a little east, shoulder to shoulder with Beauvoir.
    In Marshall’s Landing in the 1940s, when she was a small child, there had been perhaps seventy families, half a dozen orchard estates. The estates had anchored the landscape, economically and socially. Eagles’ Rest, where the Protherows lived, the biggest, and fittingly: Major Protherow (who she had been surprised to discover, at nine or ten, was also Father Christmas at the community children’s party), the unofficial leader of the community. Mrs. Protherow, who smelled of violets and wore long, dusty-looking silk dresses and opened the Ladies Auxiliary Tea. Their spinster daughter Margaret, who gave piano lessons and painted. The name Eagles’ Rest, Father had said, came from the ospreys that nested in the tops of the tallest ponderosas and plummeted into the lake, where the shore was steep and the water transparent, dark green, to pluck out the rainbow trout. Though by the time Sidonie’s father had told her this, the ospreys had already vanished, prey to the DDT used in the orchards back then, or else the mad son Lorne Protherow’s gun.
    Next door to Beauvoir was Sans Souci, where the Inglises lived: Mr. and Mrs. Inglis and Graham and Hugh, who were older than Sidonie, as old as her sister Alice. The Inglises, their tweed suits and tea rituals, Mrs. Inglis’s herbaceous borders, the high hollyhocks and delphiniums, the peonies and Michaelmas daisies and dahlias as big as a child’s head.
    She thinks of mentioning to Walt that she is back in touch with Hugh Inglis, but does not. Hugh, whom she had followed about from the time she could walk, and who had books she might look at but not take away, and Meccano that she might not touch. What is she