Overgrowth Collection
There is a place in America, known widely as “Green Country.” The community dubbed itself as such because high annual rainfall, scrub trees, weeds, walls of green, and rot everywhere you look is apparently something to be proud of.
What in 2007 might have been considered lush, lively, and beautiful grew progressively irritating and overwhelming when the parts of America that are truly beautiful became too expensive to live in, and their occupants flooded ‘Green Country’ to take advantage of its low cost of living. Roads and utilities were soon pushed to capacity, and even scenes that might once have been genuinely beautiful were now overcrowded and hard to look at.
In response to the drastically increased populations, companies moved quickly to take advantage of prime real estate locations to open retail and service locations. The thing nobody told them was that “Green Country” is a cheap place. People don’t really spend money here unless you are an established company that they already know and trust. So stores went up, and in only a few years had “for lease” signs on their windows, or just got left to rot.
Still the displays stay on. The electricity meter keeps spinning. The ads remain. There’s nothing quite like a Green Country ‘zombie’ store.
The places people thought had staying power fell off a long time ago. When the metropolitan area expanded, the small towns dried up, and the clientele moved into the new suburbs. Ironically, as the population increased, and people found the suburban costs and the crowding too high, they sought shelter in those same small towns, only to realize that they were already fully extracted with nothing left to offer anyone.
Those of us still seeking beauty in this mess take to the back alleys and underpasses. Finally, in these rare places, you can compose a rare moment to find a sense of peace and quiet among the overgrowth.
