What a Google drive-by doesn’t see

I drove by my old house recently… the new owners have put their own stamp on the place. Sadly, they’ve cut down the magnolia tree I had planted, just as it was reaching a size where it might have done its duty blocking the street view into the sun porch. The house is beginning to show their homey touches – a summer wreath on the front door, lacey curtains in the windows, inviting lights along the sidewalk.

If you bring up the address in street view on Google maps, you’ll see MY house in all its summer glory – the picture taken in August of 2023, the very month I sold it after living there for 28 years.  The home is an adorable cape cod, with a warm red brick façade and neutral cream-colored siding, divided windows on either side of the door, matching gabled dormers above. Sharp white trim. Green leaning-toward-dark-teal shutters. Spiffy new grey roof. A compact vestibule dressed in siding juts out to enclose the front door, and a sun porch is jauntily perched off to the left side. A fabulous array of lush trees and plantings shelter the house – towering holly tree, shading maple, decorative crabapple, and cheery magnolia along with solid hedge beneath both windows, a row of azalea outside the sunporch, and a curving flower bed lined with spider plants – the whole a lesson in shades of green and red (and white when in bloom). It makes me smile to see the place so photogenic.

You can almost hear the echoes of my time there… long conversations on comfy chairs, blaring music of my youth as my cleaning soundtrack, clink of plates passed at dinner parties, the slap of cards and rattle of dice from laughter-filled game tournaments. Everyone told me how much the house suited me – the traditional shape, the warm vibe, the lovingly selected décor, the room sizes that were perfect-for-one but capable of hugging a group as well.  I can still smell the aroma of fresh-mown grass (after the landscaper took care of it), the bubble of simmering tomato sauce, the clean air of a windows-open fall day.

I notice a telling detail in the 2023 picture: the square yellow post-it note stuck inside the glass storm door at eye height. It no doubt tells visitors that the doorbell is broken, and they should knock. It doesn’t say that the doorbell has been broken for over 20 years. Installed by an owner before me, the bell was a bit of an overachievement for a small house, one of those boxes that hold four long chime tubes so it can ring out a musical peal to announce visitors. From the time I moved in, it only rang two anemic notes, and despite attempts to fix it, quickly dwindled down to nothing but a soft click that wasn’t audible beyond the entryway. I couldn’t bring myself to replace it, though. The night my father died, that dead doorbell sounded two clear notes at 1 o’clock in the morning to announce that my father had gotten his wings.

Google stores a history of pictures if you’re interested in a bit of backward time-travel. When I click back to the picture taken in a March 2020 drive-by, it is appropriately barren-looking, with cut-back plantings, dormant garden bed, leafless trees, small magnolia looking a little askew, black car under the carport. This view portends the pandemic years of lassitude and fallowness. You might imagine the home is simply taking a beat before spring planting and summer fun, but those things would not come that year, nor would any visitors. Inside, I was just beginning to grasp the implications of a rampant unknown pandemic, the need to isolate, to wait for emerging science to give further guidance and, ultimately, protection.

Google also catalogs a photo taken in July of 2012, where the property looked like a divided before/after shot. It’s clear that I can never claim to be a competent gardener – or even a proper supervisor of a landscaping vision. One side of the house and yard is brown and barren, with scorched grass, a sad attempt at summer flowers in a mostly empty garden bed, no trees, and the ugly fence between my driveway and the grumpy neighbor’s (which I thought was theirs until it blew down a few years later and they claimed it was mine to replace – with a spiffy white one of my choosing, so I win). The other side, however, shows a bit of promise, with an array of trimmed plantings in a verdant bed, all the trees full with summer leaf.

This picture, too, could metaphor my life… it was February 2012 when I was reorganized out of my job at Vanguard and came home to tend my wounds and reinvent my career by becoming an independent consultant. My well-appointed upstairs home office, lined with full bookshelves, was a considerably shorter commute and a space where my creative juices could much more freely flow. I might already be up there, designing an inviting web site, working to craft my book on learning environments, and writing conference session proposals for the following year. If you peeked in from the side window, you might catch me staring out at the neighboring trees, mulling over some new idea. Inside, my home became my very own incubation zone, but outside, I didn’t have time or budget for re-mulching or planting summer annuals. A hastily opened home equity line of credit was my back-up plan if the consulting business proved to be a slow starter (wise move). It wasn’t certain which way my career would turn out – barren or verdant; time would tell it has been a little of both in the years following.

The earliest photo Google shows is a positively gothic view from 2007. Taken in late afternoon sun, the whole property is in deep shade, the front yard dominated by a huge blue spruce. How I tried to save that tree(!), not realizing how much brighter the yard would be without it. Hiding behind the spruce is the infrequently used screened porch, too full of pollen in spring, too often hot in summer. The enclosed sunroom glam-up, window-filled and cozy, was an inspired renovation project a few years later and a space where I would spend many glorious weather days with windows wide open, laptop in use to create workshops and review student papers.

Between moving in and moving out, that house stored up memories from 28 years of my life. I lived there mostly alone, with just a few occasions of temporary housemates. The inside redecorations over the years were more dramatic than the outdoor upgrades: a kitchen spruce-up including tile flooring, the conversion of the screen porch to a dramatic 4-season sunroom, a built-in wall cabinet to hide air conditioning ducts in my bedroom, a studs-out renovation of my black-and-white bathroom.

In my mind’s eye, I can still see myself chasing Daniel and Ethan in the yard, sitting on the porch having long phone conversations with distant friends, playing games whenever nieces and nephews came to visit, reading in front of the fire. Holidays were joy-filled: family Christmas gatherings with banquet tables squeezed into the long living room, annual Christmas Eve dinners with Nick, Tim, Daniel, and Ethan, New Year’s Eve sleepover parties when the nieces and nephews were little. I see the house burried in snow, colored by fall foliage, in bloom during summers when the plantings cooperated.

I shed tears there as well. When Daddy died. When we lost my brother Jerry to cancer too young. When I suffered some of my most hurtful career disappointments. When family and friends came to me with their own pains.

But I also accomplished a lot within those walls. It’s where I studied for my doctoral degree and developed my professional knowledge, where I built my business and taught graduate classes online, where I nurtured my writing for both professional and personal purposes.

I certainly wrung a lot of life from my Wilmington home.

The day I went to close the sale of that house, I took one final photo that Google can’t see. It’s an inside view across the empty living room, taking in the fireplace (the only thing I miss), the entrance to the porch (a sunny, happy place), and the front window, which frames the magnolia tree (RIP). To me, it evokes no regrets, just a closing pause before life starts anew. I gifted the new owners a piece of cut paper artwork that depicted a tree with autumn-colored leaves blowing into a pile (it’s there on the mantle) – an image that had always reminded me of time passing by and my way of wishing them all the best as they made their own history there.

A house is an important backdrop, to be sure, but a home is made with activity, and conversation, and emotion, and overlapping memories – echoes of life that cannot be captured in a Google map drive-by.

This post brought to you by my summer writing class, where we were assigned to write of home based on the history of Google drive-by photos. I’m happy to have had an opportunity to bid a fond farewell to the old place.