So I decided to actually look at each today and show the changes. Some are minor, some are drastic. I won't give details, who knows what SOME company might find useful, LOL!
1. It was a 2 story old house when I was there. It has been utterly replaced. The 20'x30' sandbox Dad built is gone. The grape arbors are gone. The outbuilding party building is gone. The field of wild blackberries (where we kids stuffed ourselves in Summer) is gone. The slope where we sledded most Winter days is now full of trees.
The next place I lived was in Petersburg. Quite a surprise moving from Massachusetts to Virginia in the late 50s. We had to study Virginia History (mostly how evil the North was to the South). We were the only kids in in school from "The North" and were not liked.
The house is the same. Dad built a massive roof over the sunken patio using tranluscent plastic. I see it is shingled now. The part covered with trees in the right back used to be a putting green Dad set up (of golf Course quality). Mom and Dad both loved golfing, so they practiced there often (drive for show, putt for dough). There used to be a fence he built around the back yard and I see it has been replaced with shrubs. Apparently the lawn has become Zoysia grass. Awful stuff; green in Winter but brown in Summer. The trees in center left cover what was the gravel driveway Dad and I build to Roman quality roads. As a mechanical engineer, he never did things halfway (much to my dismay as a teen converted to serf labor). There were gardens and borders of strawberries when we left. Those are all gone now.
Dad had some company dump 3 dumptruck loads of dirt in the back and then dig a pit to his specifications. And he wasn't wasting any dirt. He knew the dug-out dirt would match the slope he needed around the outside. Engineers LOL...
I spent the Summer digging out soil to precise depths and tamping it down flat with a damned heavy flat weight. My brother was younger, so not expected to do much except when Dad was there to guide him. But I worked like a mule all Summer in the heat.
When the hole was to specifications, we had to install 4' sections of metal panels and drill holes in them for bolts. Drilling through metal with a handheld drill is not easy. Bits broke constantly. But entually we had the steel panels assembled. Then we had to backfill around the outsides. Guess who did most of THAT?
Finally, we installed this HUGE plastic liner. It was AWFUL. It had to be slid along some plastic ribs inch by inch. And we had to do it from above because you couldn't walk on the sand layer the liner would rest on.
Dad designed and built a diving board and a pool filter and skimmer. Too tricky for me, really. Then came the day when a water tanker arrived to fill the pool. Dad was fanatic about angling the input pipes so as to not put pressure on the bottom (and well he should).
When it was filled, we had to wait 4 days for the water to get to ambient temperature. We dove in, and I thought I would freeze to death. I seldom went swimming in it and went off to college 3 years later only daring it in the heat of August.
And after Mom and Dad moved to NH, these people who bought the house filled the pool with dirt to bury it. It was to left of the pin...
After several apartments after college, I rented a house with a friend. It was treeless except for an old apple tree. I was experimentig with raised garden boxes. so I built a star-shaped one in the lower left, an octagonal one on the opposite side of the sidewalk, planted marigolds along the sidewalk sides, removed the old apple tree (with the owners approval) and grew veggies there.
You can see the outline of the left star. Just a few years ago, you could see the outline of the right octagon. The trees have exploded into growth, hiding the old veggie garden.
So here I am in my Forever House. There are fewer trees and greenery than this pictures shows. A lot of that is wild underbrush and blackberries I cut down last fall. The stuff at the bottom is a screened garden and 2 toolsheds. The lower left is all cleared...
