jackiedoherty.org

Times were bad in the Merrimack Valley when we bought our house in Lowell in 1992. My husband got a job with Wang, and they declared bankruptcy the week we were to close on the house. We had money down and couldn’t back out of the deal. The housing market continued to slide after we bought, the house was uninsulated and cost a fortune to heat, downtown Lowell was rather grim and empty, we were insecure about the quality of the public schools, and so on. Well, in the last 16 years, we’ve seen housing values rise (and start to fall again), our son went through the Lowell school system and is now in college, Wang is gone but we’ve survived (despite a wild ride on the dot-com rollercoaster), and downtown Lowell has undergone a remarkable renaissance. One thing I remember about our early days in the house (besides sitting in patches of sunlight on the rug to stay warm in the winter) is the way people would come around on trash day, sifting through the recycling for returnables or scavenging through the trash for something of value. Gradually, as times improved through the nineties and beyond, that sort of activity diminished, but now I’ve noticed it again – lots of cars and vans circling the streets on Friday mornings, checking out the recycling bins and picking up the odd bit of furniture or scrap metal from the side of the road. While talking to a friend at a local financial institution, she remarked that for the first time in 15 years, they’ve had to hire a collections person to follow up on borrowers who have fallen behind on loan payments. Another troubling story showed up in the Globe Northwest Weekly section on Sunday: people who can no longer afford to care for their pets are dropping them off at the Lowell Humane Society. According to the animal care supervisor, Lisa Forbes, “there has been an influx of surrendered pets requiring medical attention.” (An anonymous donor has sponsored a matching gift program to help care for these animals). The foreclosure rates, the sliding stock market, the endless war, the rise in gas and food prices fill the headlines and the tangible effect of these forces can be seen all around us. These are sad signs of the times indeed.