Last year the city I live in cut down some hold and huge trees because they were widening the roadway. I miss them.
An elderly woman I knew died a few months ago; I came across her home on Zillow, cycled through the photographs of it, all empty. The next day it was gone from the site, sold; these two happenings were separate, sequential punches to the heart.
There was a nice winding, hilly road that was as thrilling as a roller coaster the first time I drove it on not very much experience behind the wheel of a car, which somehow got shorter and shorter in experience compared to memory each time I drove it, and they just went through and widened it to four lanes and reshaped the sharp turns away and leveled out the hills and it isn't the same road anymore.
The Minnesota State Fair has a place called Heritage Square, and it used to be this tight cozy place with wooden booths and stalls, all traditional, and now they rebuilt it and it's got these futuristic architectural shelter things that all the stores are under, high-roofed and spread out and very modern-aesthetic and it's not remotely the same space anymore.
Fields and forests turn into developments and fast food joints. Things get replaced with newer, modern variants that also happen to be significantly less interesting.
I hope Heaven is a spiral. I hope it contains everything at every time. I hope to walk downtown and find those trees again, and climb the mountains that were here millions of years ago and find trees that grew when trees were new, tall and old and impossible. I want to drive down roads that are terrifying in all the best ways, in a car I haven't seen in decades, to trees that never knew what a chainsaw was.