Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[jasonlulu_2000]

My family and I lived across the street from Southway Park since I was four years old. Then just last year the city put a chain linkfence around the park and started bulldozing the trees and grass to make way for a new apartment complex. When I saw the fence and bulldozers, I asked myself, �Why don�t they just leave it alone?�

Looking back, I think what sentenced the park to oblivion was the droughtwe had about four years ago. Up until then, Southway Park was a nice gren park with plenty of trees and a public swimming pool. My friends and I rollerskated on the sidewalks, climbed the trees, and swam in the pool all the years I was growing up . The park was almost like my own yard. Then the summer I was fifteen the drought came and things changed.

There had been almost no rain at all that year. The city stopped watering the park grass. Within a few weeks I found myself living across the street from a huge brown desert. Leaves fell off the park trees, and pretty soon the trees started dying, too. Next the park swimming pool was closed. The city cut down on the work force that kept the park, and pretty soon it just got too ugly and dirty to enjoy anymore.

At the drought lasted into the fall, the park got worse every nonth. The rubbish piled up or blew across the brown grass. Soon the only people in the park were geggars and other people down on their luck. People said drugs were being sold or traded there now. The park had gotten acary, and my mother told us kids not to go there anymore.

The drought finally ended and things seemed to get back to normal, that is everything in the park. It had gotten into such bad shape that the city just let it stay that way. Then about six months ago I heard that the city was going to �redevelop� certain worn-out areas of the city. It turned out that the city had planned to get rid of the park, sell the land and let some build rows of apartment buildings on it.

The chain-link feneing and the balldozers did their work. Now we live across the street from six rows of apartment buildings. Each of them is three units high and strctches a block in each drection. The neighborhood has changed without the park. The streets I used to play in are jammed with cars now. Things will never be the same again. Sometimes I wonder, though, what changes another drought would make in the way things are today.

What does the underlined sentence mean?
Can you paraphrase it?


Thank you

[pugachevV]

I wonder what changes would another drought would make.

It wasn't the drought anyway. It was lack of money, that's why the land was sold to a developer, and societal change.