This is a picture of a picture of the family farm. It doesn't look anything like this anymore, but this is exactly how it looked when I was a little girl. My great-grandparents lived there up until about 11-12 years ago. The house burned in a fire a couple of years after that. The barn is still there and there are still cows, but everything else is gone; the garden, the picket fence, the tree we used to make treehouses in...gone.
This is the yard where the house was. It looks so small without a house on it. The house was pretty good sized, so I have no explanation for that. You can see part of the tree I used to climb all the time. It's dead now. Somebody should take it down.
So, I was driving by there (because my Grandma Helen lives right down the road) and saw some lilacs. When I stopped the car, I could smell them from the road. The next day, my grandma helped me dig a shoot from the bush for me to bring back to Maryland for my own yard.
Before we left, I went to look at where the garden used to be. It was a huge garden, let me tell you. I saw a row of these bluebells under where the grapes used to be. My grandma told me how she had dug the bulbs from the creek (on the other side of the farm) when she was a little girl and my Grandma Boone (her mother) let her plant them under the grapes. This must have been roughly 70ish years ago. I had to have some of them. They aren't looking too good in my Maryland garden, but perhaps next year they'll look a little better.
I should probably make a whole other post for this next thing, but I'm kind of wanting to wrap up all the spring break fun. Knowing we don't get to burn stuff in Maryland, my grandparents saved up the brush to burn during our visit. I suppose that might sound strange, but evidently kids like to burn stuff. I was a little alarmed at the size of the fire, but that's probably a result of living away for so long now. My grandparents weren't alarmed at all.
