By JUDD SLIVKA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Don't blink on Brier Road. You might just miss downtown Brier -- all five shops.

If you pull over, there's a grocery store, dry cleaner, espresso stand, a restaurant and in case you like what you see, a realty office.

There. You've seen it.

For those who live here, Brier is a place to raise a family, buy an oversized lot, a comfortable home -- and settle down.

It is a town where politics center around personalities and not issues, a place of little crime: the recent double murder was the first major crime in nearly a decade.

Brier is an unabashed bedroom community, where car doors slam in unison at 6 p.m. and the only restaurant in town opens at 4 p.m. on weekdays.

It is a small rural spot that grew up, a place where Seattle folks went seeking country living and cheap land prices, but instead they reordered and rebuilt the place into a suburb.

It didn't used to be that way. Back in the 1940s and '50s, the land was for farms, and the dogs outnumbered residents.

"It was pickup trucks back then," Jim Vaughn laughs when he talks about the area he moved to in 1955, when it was known as Shasta Park. "Mostly pickup trucks, with people from all walks of life."

There are still some pickups. But they are late-model, three doors with liners so the beds don't get scratched.

Brier is small, about 6,200 people, just east of Mountlake Terrace, a little piece of country living.

The last mayoral race centered around whether one of the city's streets should be opened to through traffic.

It's still closed. And a bank that wanted to open a branch there was told no, because it might bring too much traffic.

Brier has no aspirations to be big. Residents here seem happy about it being quiet, faceless, a place to live but not to work.

The city has zealously guarded its small-town feel, zoning its few businesses in the commercial district as "neighborhood stores."

However, for a country town, the homey touches are missing. There is a country store, the Brier Grocery, but there are no tables and chairs inside for the morning crowd to meet and sip coffee. That's because there is no morning crowd. Everyone is too busy on their way to somewhere else.

This area, on the Snohomish side of the county line, once was known for its mink farms. Now, it's known for comfortable, if not pricy, housing. The two dozen houses for sale in Brier today start at about $160,000 and top out at about $625,000.

In moderate traffic, it takes 20 minutes to reach Seattle. In heavy traffic, plan on more than an hour. And at 8:25 a.m. on a recent sunny morning, car doors are slamming, engines idling and kids climbing into cars.

Jason's Java has a lineup of cars, and a Ford Explorer has pulled in front of the Brier Grocery so mom can pick up some miniature chocolates for the candy bowl on her desk.

Inside the store, Sue Andrade is making change, smiling at her customers, her mother is tending to the garden and it is another day in Brier, where city dwellers go to find their own versions of country living.