My mind is blown

In my on-going effort to obtain some semblance of order in our multi-generational collection of photos, I'm still scanning old photos. One of the batches of photos that I scanned, yesterday, was from the summer of 2000, shortly after our landscaping had been completed in our new home. Wow! Did I ever get a comeuppance. It showed things as they looked in those days - not as I "remembered" them. 

In Tree Work by JoJac's, I waxed eloquent (photographically) on the removal of our big old cottonwood tree. Below are two photos: the photo of the tree from 2000 and the photo of the tree in October of this year. The comparison is nothing like what I would have thought it would be. I attempted to present the two photos at about the same scale by comparing the size of the boards in Fred's fence.

While I'm stalking around the back yard, here's another comparison showing the progress in growing new grass to fill in the bare spots caused by army worms' chomping their way through our back lawn. The newly seeded lawn is shown on the left (10/16/2021), and as the grass appeared while I was watering it, yesterday (12/26/2021). We're not supposed to need to water grass in December, here in south central Kansas. It's supposed to be dormant.

 

Comments

[bogie]

Your backyard certainly has seen some changes over the years. Clearing out the brush/smaller trees looks really nice. I never would have put 2 and 2 together if you hadn't written the explanation about the cottonwood - they don't look like the same tree at all.

[Cop Car]

Bogie--There are very few plants in our yard that have been there since our original landscaping in 2000. Somehow, in laying out the landscaping, I had become confused - thinking that our house faced northeast (instead of the actual northwest). Most of the foundation plantings in front, then, got moved to the side yard where the Yew bushes weren't exposed to so much western sun during the summer. Forces in landscape changes have varied over the years from that original screwup to reducing the effort I could put into upkeep to reducing fire hazard.

However - to your point of the tree's being unrecognizable: Your dad has, for some years now, been unable to recognize me in photos from our past. (Yesterday, he asked who that woman was in the photo I posted Christmas. He said that, logically, it had to be me; but, he could not recognize it as being me.) I think that most of us are pretty insensitive to changes in people/things that we observe daily or weekly. The incremental changes are so small that our mental adjustments to them are automatic...unthinking. Each encounter establishes a new norm for us. We more easily note the changes in people/things that we see every 5-10 years or at longer intervals. Photographic evidence can sometimes convince us of our mental flukes.