Have you ever lost a special place?

I wish you’d lose your computer.

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The mall I used to hangout at is closed

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You're a teeny bopper?

Figures...

Yeah, to exes and their memories tainting them.

Pasture land, hundreds of acres with access to thousands more, up in the midwest that we used to roam when visiting family every summer growing up. What's worse is that nobody from our family lives up there anymore. Everyone is dead, and those that were left squandered all of that land then moved away, and there's nothing left up there now. It's like a whole other life that is just gone. Makes me sad.

Woods beside my mom's house. It's all developed now. We used to roam all around finding stuff to do.

And the shopping mall. Used to enjoy going into Mervyn's to see their Christmas Village sets, and play some arcade games.

The field across the creek from my childhood home is now a housing development, almost Levittown in architectural designs.

My favorite campground, on the south end of Vancouver Island, right on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where you could throw the tent flap back in the morning and gaze at the Olympic Mountains across the water. Now a Condominium of trailer spaces.

Closer? the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The beaches have retreated, the dunes are gone, and the water is much closer to the new multistory homes and the charm is gone. Going down to Hatteras Island in the National Park is the only saving grace.

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Pasture land, hundreds of acres with access to thousands more, up in the midwest that we used to roam when visiting family every summer growing up. What's worse is that nobody from our family lives up there anymore. Everyone is dead, and those that were left squandered all of that land then moved away, and there's nothing left up there now. It's like a whole other life that is just gone. Makes me sad.

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Now, just imagine how the Native Americans feel.

My childhood friend's family had a farm with an excellent bass lake we fished every day during the summer, a short walk from the house by 80's standards. Surrounded by catalpa trees and pear trees, wood duck boxes all in roost, two feeder creeks chock full of crawdads and salamanders, arrowheads all over the place, woods full of deer, coons, oppossoms, there was always something in the hav-a-hart trap in the morning, tree frogs so loud at night it would keep a yankee awake.... perfect place for boys to grow up.

It is now a subdivision with private access only to the lake, and the creeks are encased in concrete culverts. All of the surrounding woods were sold off for timber and developed.

When yankees move to metro ATL, they gotta live somewhere. And when a lower-middle class family that owns the small farm got offereed a 7 figure check, in the early 90's, they would have been fools to not take it.

Alex Box Stadium

Mendenhall ice caves, collapsed over the winter. New ones are forming but it's just not the same

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Now, just imagine how the Native Americans feel.

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I don't have to, entirely. When on vacation out west a few years ago, we passed through a town called Gallup, NM for lunch (Jerry's Cafe has the best New Mexican food on the planet).

We were outside waiting and I asked someone that appeared to be a local if they were from around there. She said "yes... well, from the reservation." That exchange hit me, that these people don't even claim that they are from a specific town. They are raised to realize that they are from a reservation... a little piece of property "reserved" for them with cookie-cutter box houses in rows. You can see them off of the interstate.