A View from the Gap

Last week, the Loudoun County Public School Board released recommended names for four new schools slated for opening in the next few years. Chosen by committees of parents, students and teachers, the recommended names of three of the schools pay homage to the surrounding area’s historic roots.

Water naturally flows along a path of least impedance. Even a mighty river begins as a small trickle that builds volume fed by many tributaries. As gravity compels the water to move, a river’s bed is cut, its banks containing and determining its course—that is until they no longer can. To skirt obstacles or bottlenecks, the water seeps or spills over its banks to form new rivulets to follow until it can rejoin the main flow in a deeper, or wider, smooth flowing stream.

Elections matter, a lot. When we make our ballot choices we are investing in the ideas and the leadership of those individuals the majority freely select. It is a distinct and awesome responsibility of a democracy’s citizens.

Despite the growth in residential development across much of western Loudoun in the past two decades, vast swaths of the landscape retain their bucolic beauty of rolling farmland and verdant wooded mountainsides, laced with hundreds of miles of country roads. Through the efforts of staunch advocates for conservation and innovative thinking among old-line farm families and young rural entrepreneurs, the banal tide of sprawl has, at least momentarily, receded, replaced by a refreshing revival of a sharing communitarian spirit.

It is one of the questions we all ask when we first meet someone. It seems we have an instinctive checklist of queries to help us get a fix on a person, associate a face and a name with an occupation or role and perhaps most important, a place. Place helps us define, in a spatial sense, how a person relates to us.