Gillis Court
Google Maps has been steadily updating its street view. I found one of the places where I grew up on it yesterday:
This is our house in Maitland, Florida, where I lived from 1981 more or less up until I came to Taiwan. I went to Maitland Junior High and Winter Park High School while living here, departed for trips with bands, orchestras and the boy scouts from that driveway. I drove my ’77 Datsun up it, wobbling from an encounter with a street racer, resulting in a huge fight with my dad. I played with our cat, Henrietta, mowed that lawn and lugged the garbage out to that curb. They planted those trees by the street, part of a neighborhood program, when I was in high school. The window on the far right was my bedroom after my brother left for college. The reason there’s a hedge on one side but not the other is because my dad hacked the other side down and then realized it was a bad idea, so he left the other one up. Originally there was a huge Christmas tree in the middle of the yard that was uglier than the hedge, but for some reason it stayed.
The living room with a pink sofa and blue carpet was home to a grandfather clock but was never really used; we watched TV in the family room. My parents added a sunroom in the back where the porch was. The main reason we bought that house instead of nicer ones in nicer neighborhoods, I think, was the pool that took up most of the back yard, leaving room only for a small patch of grass and a grapefruit tree that provided breakfast on many a Winter morning. I, at least, insisted on a pool, as it is, after all, Florida, and we’d had one at our other Floridian house we’d had before the long, dark years of schoolyard fights and general loneliness that exemplified my time in Texas. But that’s a story for when Street View catches up with El Lago.
UPDATE: I just found out that they’re going to tear down Dommerich Elementary and Maitland Junior High to create a combined new school. So many memories, it makes me a little sad that I won’t ever get to go back there to have a look around the old place.
R$id you add the picture of the house? =——–[[[4pp
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The cat just walked across the keyboard. Should be: did you add the picture of the house?
Comment by prince roy — June 19, 2008 @ 9:19 am
You can’t see the Google Streetview thing?
Comment by Poagao — June 24, 2008 @ 12:23 pm