Throwback Thursday - Our backyard 44 years later!

I have been systematically going through our photo albums lately trying to digitize photos.  I'll never get through all of them, but I am trying to get to the pictures that tell a story.  I am on #3 of 33 photo albums, and that is only since Paul and I got married.  I also have a ton of earlier albums, from both sides of the family.

I have spent a lot of time digitizing older photos of our ancestors and trying to tell their stories, but I also want to do Paul's and my pictures too.

We bought our house in April, 1973.  Kristen was almost 8 months old.

We live on a circle with 26 houses.  Our neighborhood was built on farm land; a strawberry patch.  There were only a couple of large trees which must have been on the edge of the land.  Our house is on the inside of the circle, so the back yards didn't have any boundaries.  One of our friends said it was like living in a fish bowl!

This picture, taken about 6 months after we moved in, was taken in our back yard across to our neighbor's house behind us.

This is our back yard today.  Our neighbors, Jack and Judy, planted pine trees across their back yard, and we planted forsythia.  In 2015 Judy took down the pine trees, and we lost our tree a month later due to some type of disease. Between our tree down, and her trees down, the forsythia have really taken off and gotten very thick and tall.

This picture was taken looking down the middle of the inside of our circle from our back yard in October 1973. 

Eventually everyone started putting up fences and planting trees and hedges.  This is what it looks like now.  We can't even see the hill which used to be so pretty in the fall.  

Out of the 26 houses on this circle, there are 6 original families left.  It's been a wonderful place to live!