A recent dialogue with another farm regarding their website appearance caused me to realize that….our own site really could use some help. Lack of time, technological impairment, and procrastination all combined to keep that project on the back burner…until now. I had to face it, the other day—the single biggest thing I wanted to do with the site was have more current photos available. Hardly a week goes by without some visual nugget of farm living going onto my Facebook page; why couldn’t I at least get a few things placed on the site? Then it grabbed me….roughly 5,000+ unsorted photographs, taken over years with different cameras and cell phones and smartphones, were scattered all over hard drives and hidden in folders. No wonder I never tackled the job; the real problem was the job before the job. So with a deep sigh, I took a few moments to learn how to work with iPhoto, and started flinging images into folders. Renaming. Adjusting. It took one hot afternoon’s work, but about 3,000 photos since 2007 made it to some kind of order. As to the rest….well, I have to find them first.

But all the flitting photos were jarring to see….did it really look like that? Has it really changed that much? When they talk about your life flashing before your eyes, they must have been looking at a 368 photo import. One of the most startling things was The Vegetation. When we moved here, the street was visible from our front room window. Now, that visibility extends about 15 feet. We live encircled by walls of living privacy fence…massive hedges of berries, layered with fruit trees, ornamental grasses, random clumps of flowers. It isn’t possible to tell there IS a street, except from the sound of the occasional passing vehicle. The changes in infrastructure seem quite dramatic too….tents, structures, fencing for pens. They add themselves as layers, and after just a few short weeks the memory of what was(n’t) there before fades away. Until the old photos come out, at which time the view seems quite shocking. All in all, we have a jungle of barely managed plant life here. For so many years, the property defined itself by its austerity, but no longer. Our first building project, our lighthouse chicken coop of which we were so proud, is now barely visible behind a morass of weeping willow and black bamboo. Times passes. Things change. Plants grow.