MISQUAH — To the Editor: I went to the meeting Monday about the eighteen houses, the same as half the town, and I stood in the hall because there were no chairs, the same as the other half. I want to say plainly what I tried to say there in too many words, and what I have had two days since to say better: I am not against this, and I am not for it, and I have decided, at seventy-one, that this does not make me a coward. It makes me a man who has lived here long enough to know that a thing can be good and still cost you something, and that the bill comes whether or not you read it.

I have watched this town worry, every single year of my life, that it is dying. That the young leave and do not come back. That the school will shrink a grade at a time until it closes. That the future is happening, briskly and without us, somewhere to the south. And then a man from the Cities stands up in our city hall and offers to build eighteen houses that a young family might actually afford to buy, and I watched a roomful of us — me included, I will own it — find eighteen separate reasons to be nervous about the thing we have been praying for since before some of those young families were born. That is the honest part, and it is the part nobody at the meeting wanted to say into the microphone.

So I will ask the council three things, and then I will sit down. First: find out about the water before you vote, not after. Dorothy Knutson is right about that aquifer, she has been right about water for thirty years, and you all know it even when she is inconvenient. Second: protect the cranes in the low corner of that pasture. They were here before the fence, they ask us for nothing, and a town reveals itself in how it treats the things that cannot speak at a public hearing. And third: go slow. This town is good at going slow. It is the thing outsiders mock us for and the thing that has saved us from more than one mistake, and for once it is also exactly the right speed. We have wanted young families for thirty years. Let us not botch it in the one month they finally show up at the door. — Harold Aas, Misquah