Nostalgia

MMMMmmmmmm, can you smell it? I am just loving the spring smells and sights this year. For some reason it is just conjuring up memories of growing up. The aroma of honeysuckle, maple and oak trees, hearing so many varieties of birds sing, watching the iris' and the azalea bushes...beautiful!! All of these familiar, but forgotten sights, sounds and smells make me miss our Alabama home and childhood. So, I decided to google our old address and it gives you the option to view from street level! Holy cow...it was just what I needed. It was amazing. I was able to follow the street from beginning to end and remember things, like riding our bikes up and down that big hill (oh, it seemed so much bigger when I was young) and into Gene and Geraldine's driveway and backyard, playing kickball in the circle, running across the circle to Jennifer's house, riding our bikes up the ditch at the side of Bearden's house and right into a swarm of bees (and running home with bees stinging me all the way and Ryan yelling "Run Jaimee! Run!), swiping plums off of someone's tree up the street every year, fireworks in the circle (and being terrified of the fireworks in the circle...for good reason-namely whistling chasers and bottle rockets), my brothers' forts they dug out of the ground (so cool) and the construction workers filled in when the new neighborhood was being built behind ours, moms amazing gardens, the tower the scouts built in our yard (that broke while Jessica and Jennifer and me were at the top), burning leaves in the backyard, the opposums that ate out of the nasty bucket on our back deck. Oh so many memories flood back just seeing the street. Now if google maps could only let me glimpse inside that house!!

*Seriously, any of my siblings or mom and dad reading this should go to google maps and do it...it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately you can't get real close to our house and yard...but check out that maple tree in the front that is so big now. And then after you do that, you should all come out here and see us!! It is so beautiful...not the humidity though, yuck.