Nostalgic for the North
 

The Villages is lovely, honestly. But I still have days when I really miss the north.

So here's a picture of my old back yard.

The tree in the forefront is my "mama maple." One of her "children" is directly behind her to the right, there are five more of her kids behind the fence. The blue-grey square next to her is the facade of our compost heap. The spikes sticking up in a circle around her I call LogHenge, it's a sculpture design I created with upended logs from trees we took down on our property, antique bricks we found mostly in our back yard (the entire town was the #1 source of bricks in the country when it was first settled in the 1700's), some boulders, and an antique white enamel sink we found in the back yard that I put on an old park bench and made a planter out of it.

Mama maple is around 250 years old. Ours were all sugar maples.

This is what my yard looked like before we got the new fence. You can see "loghenge" surrounding the Mama Maple a lot better. I took the picture through the screen window in my office. It was mostly a wilderness - nothing could really grow under the maple because of the shade, and because the previous owners tied their dog to a run back there and he destroyed the soil. That's why I covered the whole thing with mulch and didn't try to grow anything except in the sink on the park bench (where I grew lemon thyme and dill).

Pretty sure this shot was taken in early September before the leaves started to turn.

Stay warm, still very cold up here, you would get over missing it fast.

Both are lovely. Looks like a lot of work needed to keep it up.😬

A sink in the yard is sometimes an indication of a trash collector who then calls the stuff "art"...it's not. You'd have less nostalgia if bought a shovel...filled it rocks and bent over with them a few hundred times simulating snow shoveling....

Those trees are lovely. Sadly, I don’t think they do well down here.

Will send a picture of the lower 40 if you wish

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It's also an indication of a property that was once a farm in the 1700's, and then eventually subdivided. The original farmhouse was next door to us. There was a small trailer park in the back of our property in the 1950's, and the sink was brought in some time in the 1940's. When they tore the trailer park down to build a senior apartment complex, they left the sink behind - along with many of the bricks that had been part of the original farm's outbuildings.

No, I wasn't a trash collector. And yes, I did turn a 1940's white enameled cast-iron sink into a planter. And built a short wall around the tree with antique bricks.

If you have a problem with my idea of repurposing antiques and vintage objects into artistic endeavors, then I feel sorry for your lack of creativity. Your life must be very boring if you aren't capable of existing unless everything fits precisely into its intended spot and anything that doesn't be immediately destroyed.

Not much really. I had to weed through the mulch and re-mulch once a year. We also had to pay someone to trim the tree and remove a couple of the other trees that were too close to the house. Because the soil had already been destroyed and it was a fenced-in back yard, there was no need to resod it or try to restore the soil. I had an herb garden on the side of the garage, and we put a pool out behind the garage and built a walkway with pavers to a new paver patio out back. The rest of the yard was left mostly for wildflowers (which we mowed down a few times a year, heh) and a huge patch of moss that hubby used as a putting green.

(our property was on a 1/2-acre corner lot, only the front yard wasn't wooded).

As a kid, I used to love the first and subsequent snowfalls up until January 1st.Then I was done and wanted shorts weather. We still go back "up north' a couple months in the summer because the weather is pretty perfect ( except for last year when it matched TV in both temp and humidity). But the past is just that, the past. We've moved on.

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I grew up and lived the first 35 years of life near Chicago.
Then moved to Boston area for the next 20 years.
And now 17 now in Florida.

If I have the hankering to go north, I go to Ocala.

I'm SO DONE with cold and snow and ice and...
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Living year round in the north didn't agree with me. I moved to Rochester, NY in June after I finished my education in DC. The summer there was incredible with long beautiful days. I loved the Thousand Islands and Finger Lakes regions. Then....winter came with 144 inches of snow (1970-71) instead of the 72" average. The short heavily overcast days were just too much for me and as soon as possible I found another job in the southwest, near where I grew up. I tell people the longest 20 years I ever spent were 30 months in Rochester. Interestingly, I knew several fellow students from Rochester and none of them wanted to move back. The two I knew well remained in the DC area.

I do believe most people miss the fun times of somewhere else in they're life just a bit. Way to o ly remember the good things. I moved west to San Fran for 20 years and then returned to the home my parents raised me in. I have fond memories of both cities and will never regret moving.

At least it looks pretty. Times like this glad I was able to work from home last 18 years living in Va.