Flashback Friday

Time has a way changing all things.  It can crawl and it can fly.  It can comfort and it can raise your hackles.  It can hurt and it can heal.  Strange stuff this time.  You can't see it but you can feel it.  You can start it, measure it, but you can't stop it.  

This week, while going over some new found pics daughter Kenze brought over, I spied this one and knew instantly what today's Flashback would be.  Longtime readers will instantly recognize the first picture here as a village-wide football game in our backyard.  The lot, a combination of Arminta's yard and ours, became, through the years and seasons, equal baseball and football field.  

In the foreground is one of the Schwinn bicycles that belonged to the Wombie and me we got for Christmas a few years before.  We three boys are there somewhere, and, if memory serves, even Herb was willing to put himself on the line.  I still remember that afternoon and the fun of the day. 

Fast forward 30 years almost exactly, and this was that same area without boys to wear out the grass and go out for a long one.  The greenery having grown to hide.  Arminta died a couple years before this picture.  The Seaton's still lived in the house across the street.  Now no longer yellow.  A house was built to the right but we were gone from living here for many years. 

Both pictures were taken by Marj at the side door of the wonderful porch we had on the back of the house.  Thirty years after the first picture, the footprints and roughhousing of boys' feet were only memories.  Herb had constructed a flagpole and the large lot was now only a nuisance that had to be mowed.  Even the shrubbery seemed to sigh in its less manicured state:  healthy and growing, but with much less to see these days.


The folks now were old and near the end.  Imagine their melancholy at the passage of time as once this area was the epicenter of summer and fall activity.    And lets not forget that along the hedge row on the left were the snow forts and tunnels in winter.  It was a kind of natural treasure that can only really be appreciated looking back - and within the confines of small towns. But youth gives way, as it should, to time.  Thirty years later all has changed.