They Paved Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot

Harley is here visiting with us, and we're enjoying his company
and his counsel, as ever. I took a ride up north with him yesterday,
and drove by the old homestead, 5065...

It was a brutal shock. In a larger sense, I am detached from the
property and its future. We spent 20 years nurturing and caring for
the beauty that was there. I have no judgment as to its future, but
still....When the old cedar trees were chopped down, I thought of
them as Robert and I, long-standing and enduring, and now gone
from casting our shadows on that ground. Our secret garden behind
the wall, the lilacs, the roses, the fragrant honeysuckles which twined
the latilla poles, the trumpet vines which thrilled us with their stunning
color---it's all gone now. Incomprehensibly sad.

They paved Paradise, and put up a parking lot.


The photo I stole with my Pocket Digital has a ghostly feel -- the light
swirling over the old house is evanescent as memory. Compare this
to the photographs I posted last year, in the same place -- the view
from my north window -- and the Last Day of Summer.