Wednesday, May 30, 2018

As a youth...

...I grew up in a small town proximate to the Long Corner of Howard County. My father knew a guy who was a practical joker and one year said wag sent my father a post card saying that he was vacationing in Ellicott City. The gag being, of course, that no one would vacation there and it was not even 20 miles from where we lived.


This isn't the actual post card as this picture was taken sometime in the late '60s or early '70s. But it clearly illustrates the slope of the town, and what the place looked like in better days.

In the late 1980s I was looking to buy a house in Howard county and Ellicott City was one of the places I looked. Saw a couple of nice properties, but ultimately ended up moving to a planned community built by Rouse nearby.

Ellicott City has been on the news lately, I don't have access to broadcast television so I didn't see the actual news reports but I found some videos on YouTube. Here is what the place looks like now:



I just checked my front yard and while there is some water rushing through the ditch my cars are not being swept away. For that I am thankful.



This evening's sunset - it has stopped raining for the moment.


10 comments:

deborah said...

I played the song while watching the flood vid muted. Talk about Sixty imposing his reality on a person. Marylander, eh? Probably one of the last I would have guessed :)

The Dude said...

I wuz country, I tell ya, but got to see all the important things - the Smithsonian, all the local battlefields (and I'll tell ya what, wars raged through that area for many decades), old architecture, old roads, old trees, it was a great place and time to grow up.

deborah said...

I hear you. I spent 30 years in rural Virginia. I would often look out my kitchen window and wonder if a skirmish had occurred there, or imagine Indians, etc.

The Dude said...

Currently I live on land that was on a major Indian trading route for a thousand years or so. It ran from what is now Atlanta to the Richmond area.

My neighborhood was the site of the bivouac for the largest mustering out of Confederate troops at the end of the War of Northern Aggression. It was bigger than Appomattox by a significant margin. They were here. Now they are ghosts.

deborah said...

Neat. I've heard said the past is not dead. It's not even past.

deborah said...

Did you ever find Indian or Civil War artifacts?

chickelit said...

Many years ago, we had the notion of buying property on Palomar Mountain, east Oceanside (I nicknamed it Mountainside). Our love for the area was based on numerous visits, usually camping. The 6,000 ft climb is dramatic and there's a whole different microclimate up there (it snows a lot in the winter and is always cooler than the surrounding desert.

We looked at places and found one property which we almost bought but didn't. A few years later, that exact property was caught up in one of the dramatic forest fires. We never did buy after that.

chickelit said...

deborah said...
I hear you. I spent 30 years in rural Virginia. I would often look out my kitchen window and wonder if a skirmish had occurred there, or imagine Indians, etc.

Did he look like Ed Ames in the TV show?

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

that flooding is epic

deborah said...

Get your mind out of the gutter, chick.