Tonight the planning board takes up eighteen lots on the forty-one acres of the old Hagen pasture, and this newspaper, which is asked with some regularity to take sides, is going to decline again, and explain why, which is a different and we hope more useful thing.

The argument is usually framed as growth against preservation, newcomers against old-timers, houses against the view. That framing is tidy and it is wrong. The truth, as anyone who has actually listened at the Daybreak knows, is that most people in this town want both things and cannot have them, and are arguing less with each other than with themselves.

We say we want young families. We mean it. A town without young families is a town quietly closing, and we have watched enough small towns close to know the sound it makes. But young families need somewhere to live, and the somewheres do not appear by wishing; they get built, on land, and the only land is land that is currently something else, usually something nice, usually something with a view that somebody has enjoyed for thirty years and reasonably does not want to lose.

So the person who wants the school to stay open and the person who wants the pasture to stay a pasture are, more often than not, the same person, and the fight we are watching is that person trying to reconcile two true things. That is not a failure of the town. It is the town taking a hard question seriously, which is the most a town can be asked to do.

We have no recommendation on the eighteen lots. We are a newspaper, not a zoning board, and the people elected and appointed to decide this have our confidence and our sympathy, because it is a genuinely hard call and someone has to make it. We would ask only two things of everyone in the room tonight. Listen to the people you came prepared to disagree with, because some of them are right about some of it. And remember that whatever is decided, you will all be neighbors on Wednesday, and for a long time after. Growth and grief often wear the same coat. So do a pasture and a future. The town will get through this the way it gets through everything, which is together, and a little grudgingly, and then fine.