Choice Morsels

The Mama Kat prompt for today is, "share a post inspired by your childhood neighborhood." I grew up in Indiana, way out in the country. This forest photo is what my back yard looked like. And across the road. And pretty much my whole neighborhood.  Our house sat off a State Road in a cleared top corner of 22 acres of heavily forested valley with a creek. That road ran past our house, down a moderately steep hill into a valley, across the bottom, then up the other side. If you kept going west, the land gradually flattened out into cornfields and cattle farms, but where we lived and east, was nothing but rolling hills. The area was sparsely settled with either people already retired or by families with Dad's willing to make the 88 mile round-trip commute to Indianapolis to work. Aside from a small corner grocery that had a cafe and a volunteer fire station, there just was very little around. For years and years, the only thing across the road from my hous...

The Mama Kat blog prompt option I'm doing today is,  "Your Childhood Neighborhood." The trick is--back when I was growing up in rural Indiana camera's used film and personal computers didn't exist. I never imagined forty years later I might want pictures of the old homestead to load on a blog on a personal computer! Thank goodness for Google Earth!  In order to  screen print a couple views, I had to go to street level view and actually "drive" down the road until I found the proper location.  Funny thing is: things don't look that much different from 70's, when I lived there, to 2009 when Google collected these images. A few more homes here and there, older trees, but pretty much the same. When I say rural, I mean rural. Here's a Google Earth shot of where I did my growing up: This house isn't actually the one I grew up in, though it stands on the same site. The original was one built by our Dad. It was ...