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Now that I’m back home in Utah, I realize that I didn’t take enough pictures of my parent’s property.  I missed a lot of angles.  This is why I love Google Maps so much, it can fill in some of the blanks and give perspective to my pictures.

I’ll start with the location.  My parent’s house is about 3 miles East of Tiffin on State Route 18.  If you look at a map, we’re about equal distance between Tiffin and Republic, but Republic is super small.  For some reason, Google Maps refers to the road my parent’s live on as “North Greenfield Road.”  Depending on the GPS you use, if you type my parent’s street address into a GPS it will direct you to State Route 18 on the West side of Tiffin.This next picture shows my parent’s property.  As some of the farmland around my parent’s house went up for sale, my dad bought it and increased his acreage. 1. My parent’s house.

2.  The original barn.  It’s actually the original barn with an expansion that my Dad added.

3 and 4 are additions my Dad built.  At some point we started referring to the barn as a warehouse.  It’s where my Dad stored seed corn.

5 A dome shaped tent.  For perspective you can see the front of a truck sticking out of it.

6 Storage Units.  My dad built these at some point after I graduated from high school and left home.  The little white building with no number on it is also a set of storage units.

7. Grandpa Bird’s infamous forest.  My dad planted pine trees when I was a kid and now the trees have grown into his own personal forest.

8.  Gravel parking area.  There used to be a pond in this spot.  It was never clean enough or safe enough to swim in.  We could float out on a plastic pool or catch crayfish in the pond.

9.  Garage and Car Port.  My parents never parked in the garage.  It was always for storage.  They boarded up the car port to store other people’s things before they built the storage units, but they have since taken the boards down and actually park a car there now.

10.  The front yard.

This is the sign in front of my parent’s house (driving East from Tiffin).  My Mom designed the Logo for my Dad’s Hybrid seed corn business.  My Dad has sold his corn business and now runs a business called Bird Agronomics which specializes in soil enrichment, tillage radishes, inoculations and other such things.Here is the sign from the West side (the picture is taken through my windshield, so ignore the slight glare). This is the street view of the house.  The front door faces the yard.  In the distance you can see the a white structure (the carport).  We had a flat roof when I was growing up.  My parents added the pointed roof after I left for college.  My older sister used to say the house looked like a lunch box with no handle on top. Here is a front view of my parent’s house.  The addition on the right (South side) was also built after I moved out.  When we moved into the house there was a second floor door to nowhere from our dining room.  My parents put a concrete pad on the bottom and a big porch on the top that ran the length of the side of the house.  They have relocated the porch to the back of the house. Here is a closer view of the addition.  It is the business entrance for the storage units and the other business my parent’s run from home. We sometimes saw raccoon on the other side of the sliding glass door.  They’d come and eat cat food if we left it out on the front porch. Here is a partial view of the second floor porch which was relocated from the South side of the house to the back or East side of the house.  Where you now see tall trees, there used to be corn or soybean fields.  After my Dad bought the property, he planted a huge strawberry patch there.  Trees started sprouting up at some point and just took over the garden on that side. This is the front yard.  It’s a little hard to see, but there is a weeping willow tree at the end of the yard.  We used to swing from it’s vine-like branches.  We also had a swingset at the end of the yard by the weeping willow. We played a lot of kickball and volleyball in that yard.Here’s the road leading up the the barn/warehouse.
This is a back view of the garage/carport.  You can see the roof of the house and there is a garden in some of the area where there used to be a pond.This is the back yard behind the garage.  That old clothes line has always been there.  The part with all the trees is where the strawberry patch/corn/soybean fields were.  The darker green tree is a purple lilac tree.  There is a white one on the South side of the house.I took pictures of two other landmarks of my childhood near my home.  When I was in Jr. High, we had a house fire just before Christmas.  After staying in a hotel on the West end of town for a week or so, we rented a farmhouse to live in until our house was gutted and repaired.  The other landmark is a pond that we used to visit often.The farmhouse has been remodeled since we lived there, but I think the barn on the property is about the same, just a little more run down. We explored the barn and played hide and seek in there when we lived at the house.  There was a farm at this house years before.  I remember walking down to the fence behind the barn and feeding the cows and horses grass through the fence.  I also remember that they had a bunch of structures that looked like overgrown doghouses with baby cows in them.  They may have been for raising veal. One time when I was washing dishes in the house, a felt a mouse run across my toes.  We regularly found wild animals in the house.  After a vacation, we came home to bunny droppings all over. We rode our bikes down to the pond.  We swam in it a few times, but mostly we caught fish.  Sometimes we used real fishing poles, but a lot of times, we just made our own fishing poles with string and sticks.  We’d catch some fish and take them home and let them swim around in a blue plastic pool.  I don’t ever remember eating them.  Sometimes we’d just catch them and then let them go again.  The pond was surrounded by cattails and it had a little dock.  There are more houses next to it now.
Directly across the street from my Parent’s house are some woods.  We spent many hours out exploring in the woods.  I remember laying on an island in the middle of the stream daydreaming for hours.  Unfortunately it was too overgrown to explore and take pictures: This last picture doesn’t fit with the rest, but it didn’t fit with my Tiffin pictures either.  I was in 4-H as a kid and every year I went to summer camp on Kelly’s Island which is located on Lake Erie.  I took this picture on our trip to Put-in-bay because it reminded me of what it looked like when we’d pull up to the Ferry that would take us to summer camp.