Yesterday I left for work early to look for photo opportunities. I drove south of Eau Claire and decide to drive past where my grandmother lived a lifetime ago. To say she had issue is to understate it. Her alcoholism (“you can’t be an alcoholic if you only drink beer”) was in some ways the least of it. The house was, bluntly, a four-room shack where the sleeping areas were divided between her sons and daughters by sheets hung as curtains. It was ripped down as soon as she died, and no one misses it. One of my uncles and his wife had a mobile home on the property for a time till he died from cirrhosis of the liver a few years later. Like mother like son, I guess.

The property has apparently been sold again and there is now a huge & fugly McMansion going up there. At least a couple of the oaks I played under as a boy survive. The grass runway and hangers next door of the Piper J3 Cub owner I first flew with are long gone; the land being turned into housing plots.

Good night moon…