The other day I was messing around with Google Maps and I decided to check out our street. When I clicked on the satellite photo, I saw something I hadn't seen in many years...
I saw the way my childhood home used to look.
It was like stepping back in time.
The photos taken by the Google Map vehicle of the house my dad designed and almost lived long enough to see it fully completed looks so so different.
Oh, that yard.
I was not big on yard work, even as a kid. My mom, being alone a few short years after they moved to Farmington, had to not only raise three kids by herself, she had to take care of a 1/2 acre yard that, for many years, butted up against the mountain. You ever try to weed a mountain? It ain't easy. My mom landscaped it so the yard would required a minimal amount of work to keep it respectable.
The main thing I remember (and the first thing I saw when clicking the Street View...) were the pfitzers. Those things were an entire ecosystem--or several ecosystems--all by themselves. They were thick. We planted them to hold the hill back in the 1970s, and they did a terrific job. They were also famous for eating things...frisbees, baseballs, Hot Wheels. Like goats, the pfitzers would eat anything.
The owners who bought the house after my mom passed ripped out the pfitzers--thank goodness. They also took out the mini trees that resembled green sentinels keeping watch over the Taylor fortress.
If you drove down our dead-end street now, you'd see a whole new building on the north side. Gone are the cement steps and that driveway--talk about eating things. That driveway ate show shovels. Shoveling that driveway was more than a chore. It was a battle of man (us kids...) vs nature (snow...) vs the immovable object (that uneven driveway...). Eventually, the kids won, which meant the car made it safely up the hill, but the wars were epic.
Living across the street from the home your parents sacrificed so much to build and upkeep can be difficult...the memories, the conversations and hugs that can no longer take place. But, seeing it again, after all these years, when my mom lived there. Well, that kicks it into the bittersweet category.
No, sometimes you don't need a time machine--just access to Google Maps when they haven't updated the picture for fifteen years or so will do.
No comments:
Post a Comment