You've got to be a fool to want to stop the march of time....

[dolari]

There is one thing I've liked since moving to San Marcos. In fact, it's something I looked forward to when I moved here. This is a smallish city in the middle of the Rural Hill Country Texas.

When I first started exploring the area in the late 80s, early 90s, I would come down the old Stagecoach Road. In those days, the road hugged the edge of a cliff on the Blanco River, and Amy and I would always pull over and get a good view of the river below. The whole are was pretty rural until you got into San Marcos proper.

When I moved here a few years ago, I was very happy to have that ruralness back again, but something I missed terribly was the cliffside drive. The road haas been closed off and rerouted away from the edge, and a house now sits on the former roadbed. A subdivision has just opened across from the county park that used to sit alone on the road, and now Yarrington Road at Post, instead of being a sleepy interchange in the middle of no where, is being turned into a fullblown split level interchange.

It's sad, the ruralness is going away. It's going to become harder and harder to escape into the nature. It's taken twenty years to start developing out here, but in a few years, it won't be recognizable anymore, and I'll have lost those fields, just like I lost the cliffside drive.

I'm all for progress - I just wish it wouldn't turn my favorite realities into nostlagic memories as often as it does.

Comments

[hurricane-amy.livejournal.com]

I miss you...

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

It was difficult when I was kid and my dad would say things like "I remember when all of this subdivision was all fields". I'd look around at the houses, all of which were filled with families who had made lives in them and not be able to envision what he was talking about.

Then it happened to me. I went back to where I'd lived as a teemager, and there in what had been a large open field were houses, filled with families making their lives in them, and I said to myself "I remember when this was a field".

The only constant is change.

[emilydm.livejournal.com]

The farm my best friend in Grade Four grew up on is now a "Comprehensive Development"-style subdivision with scores of tiny cookie-cutter houses crammed side-by-side. Another dozen rural homes to which I used to deliver newspapers are now either flattened, blasted and filled in with more cookie-cutter houses in their place, or vacant with a rezoning notice posted on the front lawn, awaiting the same fate. My shortcut trail home from school is long gone and buried, as is the school for that matter. The old cement plant is now garden shops, auto parts stores and U-store compounds. The trail through the swampy potato field and along the power lines to the reservoir is now four-lane parkway into a giant construction zone.

Oh that I could borrow the Delorian for 24 hours. Not to see the people again and give myself a very stern talking to (as tempting as that would be), but just to go to all those places that have fallen victim to the bulldozer and city planner since I remembered them last, to visit just once more and better document what's so quickly lost.

[http://users.livejournal.com/strangelv__/]

I got my first exposure to this at a reasonably young age. The triangular block everyone played in among the trees and piles of dirt and the mysterious unfinished one-room building that was just a foundation and a bunch of cinderblocks all went away with a new housing development.

One idea that I've encountered (or was I the one who suggested it) would be to equip your kids, relative's kids, et c. with digital cameras and instructions on picking out things most likely to vanish as well as things they can't imagine vanishing, et c.

Take all the photos in the world and maybe sort by date.