This is the Google Maps Street View of my parents’ home. It’s from 2007, which is old by Google Maps standards. The current view looks very different ten years later. The house is a different color, the front lawn is now completely garden (more like a jungle at this point), and the tree on the road verge was slain by ash borer.
All three cars are gone too. The black Corolla was my sister’s first car. The blue Corolla we inherited from my grandma; it nearly won Worst Car senior year, and my cymbals were stolen from it once, but I remember it fondly. The white Camry was an inheritance from the other grandma, since replaced by another.
I suspect the Google Maps Camera Car will make its way back to this street one day and replace this image with a new one. Until then this snapshot will remain like a mural, a mosaic of memory, unaware a new coat of paint will erase it from existence, but only for most.
Comments
Street View is a bit creepy (Germany, I understand, forces Google to blur all private residences). But it’s also a fascinating world of its own. I used it to visit typewriter repair shops around the country.
“Creepy but fascinating” is a pretty good way to describe a lot of new technologies these days.
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