A Street with No Name
Last summer, I wrote about some of the pleasures and
peculiarities about living in the country. What I hadn`t come to appreciate at
the time was the frustration that would come from living on a street that has no
name. At first, the idea of having a nameless street seemed rather nice. In this
day and age where it seems even the most personal information about yourself
somehow ends up in the hands of marketers and government agencies, the thought
of not having a street to be identified with gave me a certain sense of
anonymity that I found comforting. However, as time goes by, I keep finding out
that not having a street name causes far more headaches than having a street
name does.
The problem first cropped up when I attempted to get the
electric service connected. It`s not all that easy telling someone to turn on
the electricity to your house when you can`t tell them where your house is. The
solution turned out to be matching the name of the previous occupants with the
house. I don`t know how the previous tenant ever described where they lived to
the electric company in the first place, but I don`t really care - at least I
have electricity.
After that incident with the electric company, I tried
in earnest to discover if the road did, indeed, have a name. What I discovered
was that yes, the street did have a name. Unfortunately, this "name" was
different depending on who you talked to. Some said it was the Kimball Hill
Road, named after the original settlers of the area. Others insisted it was the
Tibbits road, so named because half of the people who live on the road are from
the Tibbits` family. It`s also been called the Raleigh Road after the family
that built the house I`m living in. Recently, I heard it referred to as the
Hatch road -...