Tuesday, April 27, 2010

With Lovey, and Memories

At home, with Lovey in my lap. I need to go pay a bill this afternoon, watch NCIS and then I can collapse in my own bed with Lovey. The red kids were super today - we ran into Rio, and I had had Remy and Rosie sit and listen to me, and Rio passed within ten feet of us, and the kids ignored him. That felt good. Aiko and Yoshi had a skip around the block this morning also, which made Yoshi take a long nap afterwards. A neighbor in Githens' Acres asked me in to see her new chicks - she's got ten babies, aged 1 to 3 weeks; now she has to hurry and construct the chicken coop. And this person's next door neighbor has also made inquiries about raising her own hens, too.
Feeling nostalgic, I looked up the house I spent 20+ years in on Google maps. I felt lost. I recognized the house's street position from the satellite view, but freaked out when I got the street-side view. That wasn't the house I grew up in! It was the wrong color! And most of the trees in the yard were gone - it looked .... naked. I finally took in the fact that an owner (later than my mother) had enclosed both the porch and the carport; that there was now an HVAC unit under what had been my bedroom window, which explained why the propane tank in the back yard had disappeared; I saw that the big pine in the northeast corner of the yard was still there, as was one of the magnolias and the bay tree we had planted as a family; and that a row of gardenia bushes along the back property line was still there. But there was a palm tree in the southeast corner of the yard! And all of the carefully tended rose bushes were gone, too.... Then it struck me as funny that I had expected the house and yard to stay the same after a 30 years' absence. I certainly have changed in appearance in those 30 years. Why should a house and living items in a yard stay the same? But I still remember the absolute ... shock ... of seeing something different from my memory.... It was weird.

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