Things to Come: Wiehle Metro Station
When I write poetry in the morning the noise from Lawyers Road is ever present. I usually pretend it’s a river. Every once in a while a quiet spell comes with no cars and I enjoy the silence. I don’t write when it’s silent. I just listen until the river starts up again. It gives me time to think about things that are coming this way.
On Monday at 3:30 pm the Board of Supervisors will vote on the approval of the lease agreement between Fairfax County and Comstock to build the 2,300 parking garage at Wiehle Metro Station. I had hoped the local papers would carry some information about that, but they haven’t.
Pages 71-79 is the text the Board of Supervisors will vote on:
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/government/board/bdagenda/boardpackage-june-1-2009.pdf
We have some time to consider the details of this new project. There are some loose ends to tie up before everything is finalized and that isn’t anticipated for about a year. The zoning has to be approved. The Reston deed which governs the Reston Center for Government and Industry (RCIG) has to be amended. There are actually two deeds of Reston. The homeowners have their own with covenants that protect trees and make sure we don’t have purple front doors. The RCIG covenants disallow residential properties in the corridor. Their deed also mandates 50% open space. If that part of the deed is amended, the open green spaces along Sunrise Valley and Sunset Hills may be folded into the many redevelopment projects that are on hold for the Dulles Corridor.
These are things we need to be aware of especially since the Reston Association Board seems to be open to giving away our parkland at Brown’s Chapel and our woodlands along Chimney House Road near Lake Anne. The days when we could live here and think that life will go on pretty much as it has are over. The spaces in the traffic along Lawyers Road are filled with more than silence. They are filled with worries about what is to come. So far, between the worries, the poems are still coming.
Never seen before,
the new fly sits here on the page,
yellow thorax, striped abdomen, transparent wings,
his awareness as pointed as my pen.
The pen moves and
he moves, too.
Kathy Kaplan