The top photograph has Bill Ryder's Pacer in the driveway. You can see aluminum foil in the bedroom window to help block out the morning sun. Those cheesy, thin curtains hang in the closet window over the garage and the front room window.
In both photographs, you can see the lawn that the builder had installed the previous year.
In the bottom photograph, you can see the aluminum foil in the family room window.
On google maps, I saw my house as it is recently. The lawn was devastated and almost entirely gone all the way around the house.
I lived at this address, as I have said, from the Summer of 1978 until the Spring of 1991. I sold my house in 1994 or 1995, after renting it out to three different tenants. Once you rent out a house, you never really feel the same about it after that. When my friend Roger's friend and his boyfriend lived there for several months, I still would spend a random night sleeping in the spare bedroom when I drove down there. And in between renters, I would return to fix up or paint one room or another.
Yet when it looked as if I would never return to the Springs to live, and after I had become exasperated with renters who did not take care of my house when they lived there, I finally decided that I needed to sell it. It was too difficult to rent in Denver and rent out my house in the Springs.
I did have my RAoF characters show up in the backyard to bury the cremated remains of Schnozz, my cat. Pictures of her here in Colorado Springs will show up soon enough. And the move to Denver would be a decade away after I got her as a kitten from someone at work. That was my homage to this wonderful residence on the hill, overlooking so much of the city and the mountains beyond.
These photographs become signposts of where we were and where we are no longer. Of those whom we knew and now longer know, or those with whom we were friends and family whom we no longer experience among us.
They are little portals, tiny windows into our past lives and past experiences, some of which we treasure more than gold or jewels. Places where we spent so much time, or very little precious time, only to find that those times are gone forever. They exact a twinge of our souls when we linger over them and pull from our dusty thoughts a bright memory that does not ever seem to fade.
Selectively pulled out from our pasts, like a dentist might remove a tooth, we might not be exactly who we are now, to our detriment.
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