Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Category: Photographs

  • Old Erskine Boulevard photos

    I’m feeling all nostalgic after Monday’s post about Erskine Boulevard, where I grew up. So indulge me as I share some photos I took along the boulevard when I was as a kid. This is the oldest photo I have from my days on Erskine. I was nine, and we had just moved in. The…

  • Spring tree flowers

    The first homes in my old-suburbia neighborhood were built in about 1955, so we have plenty of mature trees. Even my house, a 1969 latecomer to the block party, sits on a well-wooded lot. Although my neighborhood shows many signs of decline today, that so many of its trees flower in the spring say that…

  • Captured: Perfect gravel road

    This country road may seem like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but it is about 100 feet away from busy US 36, two miles west of Rockville, Indiana. As I took this photograph, the rumble of cars and trucks on the nearby highway blotted out nature’s sounds. Yet when I look at this photograph…

  • Captured: Early spring crocus

    I was still living in the church’s parsonage in March, 2007, when I took this photo. I had just bought my Kodak EasyShare Z730 and was happily photographing all over the church grounds as I got to know my new camera. I’d been a member there for three years but had never noticed the bulb…

  • Captured: Felke Florist

    If you’ve never been to Plymouth, put it on your list; it is a charming small Indiana city. I came to appreciate it on my many passes through as I explored the Michigan Road in 2008. Its intact old downtown is filled with viable local shops; well-cared-for homes dating to the mid-1800s line the Michigan Road…

  • Captured: Main Street, South Bend

    You can still find many rumbly brick streets in the old parts of South Bend. This lonely block of Main Street connects Leeper Park to Memorial Hospital. It once ran south into downtown, but the hospital long ago oozed across the road. Hospitals have a way of doing that. My brother once lived on this…

  • Roadside flowers 2009

    The road-trip season is winding down. I have one more road trip planned for this year, a trek down the National Road in eastern Indiana this coming weekend. The rain we’ve had in the past week has removed much of the excellent fall color we’ve had this season – I hope the remaining color hangs…

  • A gorgeous autumn

    I usually dread autumn. It’s not that autumn itself is a problem, but it means winter is coming, and I hate winter. Give me the freedom of shorts and T-shirts year round! But even I have to admit that we are having an unusually gorgeous autumn, and I’m actually enjoying it. A typical central-Indiana autumn…

  • Logansport at twilight

    Logansport, Indiana’s vintage signs, lit at twilight.

  • It’s all in the details

    When I was a kid, it was fun to guess the make, model, and year of the cars I saw on the roads. In those days, automobile manufacturers freshened their basic designs every year between major redesigns. Those freshenings often involved some pretty obvious sheetmetal changes – new taillights, revised fenders, that sort of thing.…

  • Luna moth

    My sons and I were in Brown County yesterday. We had lunch in Nashville and then hiked through the state park. I had hoped to see plenty of crawling and flying things out in the woods, but the best sight of the day was this moth calmly perched on a church sign on Nashville’s main…

  • Spring flower surprises

    This being my first spring in this house, I wondered what surprises the yard would bring as it came back to life. My neighbor tells me that the couple who built this house did some landscaping about ten years ago. After they both passed away, the property became a rental and was only minimally maintained.…