By JUDD SLIVKA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Sue Andrade has lived here for 18 years, a little more than half the area's life as an incorporated town. Residents fearful of annexation by Mountlake Terrace incorporated in 1965.

Andrade runs the Brier Grocery, and spends her days behind the counter at a store with shelves full of essentials -- Dinty Moore beef stew, Fig Newtons, gardening gloves. It can get busy, but sometimes she waits for the occasional customer to come in.

After 3 p.m., she says, things pick up. The school buses drop off kids, parents start getting home from work. Though Brier is five minutes from the citified charms of Mountlake Terrace -- a QFC supermarket sits astride the route from Interstate 5 -- people will stop in and pick up a gallon of milk, a pack of gum, party napkins.

Andrade says this on a sleepy Wednesday morning, when no one has been in the store or the adjoining dry cleaners for a quarter-hour.

"Oh, I've seen lots of changes," she says, leaning against her counter. "We used to do $200, $300 a day. Now we make more than $1,000 each day."

The store -- on Brier Road, the city's main drag -- has seen its business increase in time with the city's growth.

In 1970, five years after the city's incorporation, Brier had 3,093 residents. In 1980, there were 2,915 residents. By 1990, there were 5,633 residents.

During one three-year period in the late 1980s, there were 700 new single-family units built, and today there are an estimated 6,180 people living within the city limits.

One of those people is Andrade's mother, who lives behind the store. Several times each day, she puts on her big straw hat and walks her garden. Because of the city's minimum 12,500-square-foot lot requirement, Andrade's mother has lots of room to grow her chestnut trees and her garlic.

Rows and rows of garlic. If it's hot and the breeze is right, neighborhood residents say, the block-long commercial district smells like garlic bread.

"My mother is much happier out here than she was when we lived in Seattle," Andrade says. "She can tend to her garden, be outside.

"The air is fresher."