As Stephens Valley (SV) enters its fifth year, it is time to
reflect on what SV is now, and more importantly, what the community can become.
Seeing the SV of 2021 is now quite easy. Just look down your street at how the
community has grown during the last year – growth that is so rampant and
successful, that surely no one could have predicted it. The Rochford team and
Land Innovations, LLC, the architects, the engineers, and the craftsmen, all
deserve credit for their parts of the process. Their creativity and
determination are notable and laudable, but the stew of Stephens Valley
includes many more ingredients, and that concoction is very similar to the
American creativity that powers our great nation.
Daniel Boorstin explained American creativity by pointing to
the “Fertile Verge.” He pointed out that a verge is a place of encounter
between something and something else. Kinds of landscapes, seascapes, stages of
civilization, ways of thought and ways of life, all presented a treasure of
verges in the early days of American development. Perhaps Stephens Valley is
positioned to become a microcosm of that success as a strikingly similar number
of verges exist right here.
Stroll down any SV street and you will encounter
architectural verges (Cape Cod, Country French, Colonial, Tudor, Craftsman,
Cottage, and Mediterranean) and inside those homes are people from a striking
number of “home countries,” with a similarly wide variety of expertise,
customs, and experience. SV residents are also of a wide variety of ages, which
also creates generational verges. Unlike the melting pot of early America,
where certain ethnicities often gathered in enclaves, the density of SV homes,
the prevalent front porches, and the sidewalks, place SV’s verges in very close
proximity. SV’s unexpected mix of peoples and architecture puts the residents
in a constant state of discovery of themselves and about others, which they
could not have known or noticed in our former, more homogeneous, places of
origin. It is not a giant leap to predict that the Stephens Valley verges of
today will yield more of a crop of creativity from the current residents than
anything the conventional farming production yielded by the efforts of the
Stephens family when they farmed and nurtured this land.
Everyone involved with Stephens Valley needs that
creativity. We have problems to solve. SV is not in any municipality, so there
is no local government (other than Williamson County government) to respond to
our needs. SV is at the verges of NES and MTEMC relative to electric power, and
neither Comcast nor AT&T seem overly interested in improving the broadband
service available to SV. Residents are concerned with a litany of issues: speed
limits, traffic management, fences, drainage, growth, and evolving
demographics. But addressing these matters presently is the domain of a de
facto government in the form of Rochford Realty and Construction, Inc. and Land
Innovations, LLC. While these entities created SV, and thus have the right to
govern it, the SV community must create ways to augment their creativity with
that of our collective creativity, which flows from the fertile verges of
Stephens Valley.
Look for new monthly chapters to the SV opportunities for
creativity and partnership with our pseudo government right here.
William Ray - Author
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