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| Brother and dog, late '70s. Printed 2018 on Ilford Fibre Classic paper. |
The thing that surprised me was 'our' road - look how narrow it is! And then I vaguely remembered there being a day when the council came by to widen our little country lane. Nowadays it's about twice as wide as you see here - enough for large milk lorries, oil lorries and just about anything to get through - albeit with care. And those verges - look how high and dense they are! They look beautiful to my eyes. Today there's not much at the sides of the road, just a bit of grass and then hedges which are clipped to almost nothing by the farmers.
I guess it's the detail that is most easily forgotten as time passes. You think the road you drive along several times a day was always like it is now, but of course things change - everything changes, little by little, day by day, year on year. I realise that these days I'm in a minority - someone who still lives at the place where they grew up (after having spent many years living in England, I should probably add, before I saw the light and came home). Looking at this simple photograph today gives me a lot of pleasure - but I wish our road still looks like it does here.
I have found that time distorts my childhood memories. I remember the street I lived on until I was 9 being vast, and the lots on which our houses sat being gigantic. I went back a few years ago and found a narrow lane and little lots. This post shows some photos:
ReplyDeletehttps://blog.jimgrey.net/2010/11/04/rabbit-hill-today/
Rabbit Hill, eh? Nice photographs, Jim - you chose a good time of year to revisit. You guys attach such descriptive names to places. We don't really do that over here - placenames tend to be based on their physical attributes, such as Blackhill, Burnside (burn meaning stream - Scottish), Murlough Bay (Irish, sea inlet).
DeleteMy parents have a summer home at Hall's Bay, and we went there every weekend when I was young. A narrow gravel road came down the hill from the highway and then ran just above the high tide mark until it stopped at a group of cabins. I loved that road. It was gravel and had a line of grass down the middle where tyres never touched. At some point during my university years our neighbours decided that they wanted to use their cabin as a base for their construction company, so they drained the bog between the cabins and the highway (illegal), created a huge crushed gravel lot for their trucks and equipment, and graded the picturesque lane to allow the easy travel of trucks. My aunt and my cousin have recently built cabins there, and are busy chopping down every tree in sight to make more room for recreational vehicles, trucks, and so on. I was there last summer and it's awful. I made some photos that turned out well, but I don't think I'll get back there again. And I don't want to go.
ReplyDeleteThe price of progress is always high, Marcus. And some progress isn't progress at all, of course. It's unrealistic to expect things to stay as they have been, I know, but when it happens to somewhere that holds such important memories for you it sucks. Best to remember things as they were, perhaps.
DeleteBy the way, I too am a big fan of 'grass down the middle'. Our driveway is like that. One time we had a guy with a digger for a day, to do some landscaping. He decided (unilaterally!) that he might as well scrape the grass off the driveway while he was there. I nearly went spare and shouted for him to Stop! in no uncertain terms. He got the message all right, even if he couldn't understand why.
The neighbours also made these large changes without asking anybody what they thought. I don't live in Newfoundland any more, but I would probably build a cabin out in the wilderness somewhere, away from the whims of others.
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