Ornamental trees gradually replaced an old almond orchard in the nearby park

I’m doing a slightly different Memory Monday today only partly because I discovered a few previously overlooked family slides. Another reason, strange as it may seem, has to do with trees. With all the powerful storms that have been blowing through our region this month, a lot of neighborhood trees have come down — many landing on vehicles and houses. I feel like a lot of times we tend to ignore our trees until they do something inconvenient! But thanks to all the time I spent playing on my own as a child, nearly every tree and shrub around our property still remains firmly planted, if only in my memory. I’ve shared a few of these images before, but they’re some of my favorites because no matter how much time changes my old neighborhood, they always remind me what it used to be like.

Lilac bush and a pasture next door

Lilac bush closeup

Big storms created a lake not far from our property, just visible behind the oak tree, center

The gravel driveway is now paved, but the oak tree remains

Above, a shot of our back yard shows the stump of an almond tree, an English walnut (center), and ground cleared for a garden where our old swing set once stood.

My last three slides are from 1976. I love this image of my sister and my niece showing the front of our house — a bottlebrush behind them on the right, and framing the photo nicely are two Modesto ash trees. Those trees were planted when the house was built (not long before I was born), and while the one on the right had to be removed a few years ago, it was only last week that the tree on the left fell during a storm, coming to rest on the edge of the roof. By the time you read this, it will probably be completely gone.

The very front of my Grandpa’s Plymouth is visible on the right