Views from Above

Here's a google earth image of our ten acres of land shown as a green rectangle of trees and brush with the long gravel driveway leading to our house, right in the center.  Our walking trail snakes around the boundary and fence lines, and wiggles through our "nature area"  - that patch of green with some trees above the house in the photo. If you click on the photo so you can view it larger, you can see where the fence we built behind the corn crib/barn that houses Rufus and the goats.  

This is an image of our place from 1978 - back when I was a year old.  Check out that huge barn!  No wonder the soil in the greenhouse and the garden is so nice, it probably received lots of organic matter from hay stored in the barn, or from animals that may have been housed there.  The workshop was painted white, and the corn crib was painted black.  The metal on the roofs isn't brown and rusty like it is now.  The room on the front of the house has nice big windows, and there are more big shade trees in the front yard, which was fenced.  The back field looks like its been planted with something that grows in tidy rows.

I took this photo this morning as I admired the amount of water standing on the ground and teased the chickens with breakfast.  If it was 1978, to my left would be that giant barn, and the workshop wouldn't have an outhouse and wood shed attached to it, instead it would be painted a pretty white.  The back of the house wouldn't have the tiny bathroom addition, either.  I bet the water would still be standing in puddles though, if they got as much rain as we did last night.

This picture is from 1986.  So, by the time I was nine years old, some of the big trees in the front yard had been removed, and the front field is plowed up and ready to be planted.  There's a tiny building in the back, which is missing now.