Change over time

On Tuesday (03 JAN) I stopped at Mill Pond Park just to take a few photographs.  There is a small stream that runs from a cattail marsh into the Chippewa River.  Over the past 10+ years I have photographed this stream repeatedly.   The photographs are usually nothing special.  I mainly take them because it is a place that I have documented so many times in the past.  Here are two photographs from this place that show how things have changed in the past decade.

This is the first photo that I ever took of this location.  It dates from sometime in the Spring of 2006 and was taken with a film camera.  The picture was eventually scanned.  When I took this picture, I liked how the bend in the stream is matched by the branches in the Boxelder tree growing next to the bank.  I also liked how the tree was reflected in the stream.

Here is the same location, photographed this week.  The Boxelder tree has long since died and fallen over.  The remaining trunk and branches lay over the stream.  Given a few more years, the trunk will rot away to nothing - Boxelder is not a strong, dense, rot-resistant wood. 

 I like this ability to look back through time, to see how the landscape has changed.  Not for the better, or the worse.  It has simply changed.