Change

I'm on Google Earth, looking at my town 16 years previously...

I’d like to take a quick moment to write about how things change... Particularly my town. It’s evolved so much in the past 7 years. Where there once was a strawberry field, there now stands a neighborhood of townhouses. Where once there was an old gas station and mini mart, there is a shopping center. Where horses once grazed on rolling hills, there is now a pharmacy and flattened mounds of dirt, about to become an old age home.

Where there now is a house that dates from the civil war, there will be a hotel. Where there is now a cemetery and an old tree, there will be a parking lot. What was once a forest is now a strip mall. What were once tobacco fields are now offices. What were ponds once have become department stores. What were once dirt roads are now interstates. Where there was once an orchard there are now apartments.

Stars once twinkled in the skies, and now they suffocate in the orange flood of streetlights that settles above my town like a haze. Beavers once built their dams over the streams, but the town has destroyed them and the beavers are long gone. Once there were wild animals here, but now all that’s left of them is on the side of the highway.. Where there once was silence, there now the perpetual mutter of the life of a city...

In 1993, my town was a small, quiet village of farms and forests that has been shattered by development.

Google Earth is so interesting.