Spring Blossom Trees~A walk Down Memory Lane Stanford California Style

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This was an original black and white photograph that I printed many years ago and painted over it with photo oils. The location was a park near Stanford. I would take Rita there when she was small as there was a wonderful trail to walk on and a park with animals that was actually a working farm right in the park. It was spring, and as much inspiration comes this time of year, I wanted to show the brilliance of the sun that day on the trees.
I am now in the groove of looking at different college sites as Rita will start her final year of high school this fall and she will be looking towards college soon. I think her options might be limited to California (due to in-state tuition),because the only other school would be University of Oregon and she felt the standards were too low there. This is from other people's input that work there. Her grades are pretty high as were her SAT scores so she really deserves to attend a school that will challenge her. She never has homework at her current school and that is strange to me.

I think every parent dreams of their child attending a great school and to me Stanford is probably at the top of the heap here on the Western side of the world. The campus is so wonderful and built in the style of the California missions and I absolutely love the museum that is just off campus. It has been renovated since I last lived in the area and I hope to go back someday to take a look at it again.
My sister lived in Menlo Park for 20 years and at that time I was in Santa Cruz. Both worlds only about an hour apart but day and night. I loved going to visit her and walking the tree lined streets in her neighborhood, drinking Peet's coffee and walking along looking at the beautiful landscaped homes, where most people had a constant gardener for their property. Old homes built in the 1920s that were preserved including the landscape.

10 minutes from her home through the neighborhoods walking and across a little footbridge over a shallow creek was the Stanford shopping center. This area was the high end shopping for all the Stanford and wealthy Atherton and Menlo housewives. Bloomingdales, I. Magnin, Macy's and a myriad of wonderful little high end shops. There was a full time gardener there tending tulips in spring and always keeping the place as beautiful as a shopping center could possibly be. There was a wonderful science toy store for all the children of the intellectual professors and students, to keep the kids interested in the world via toys. I loved looking in that store. A wonderful group of restaurants where the stars ate with the locals. I remember having a sandwich and sitting next to a football star that lived in the area. I took a photo of a building in that shopping plaza that was covered in marbeled glass, and hand colored it and entered it into a Northwest Visions photography contest years later in Oregon and the museum there purchased it for their permanent collection. What a thrill to have a photo of mine in a museum's permanent collection.

I wonder what the area looks like now.. I am guessing very little has changed around Stanford. That is the way it is with old money... it pretty much preserves what it has..I wonder if the downturn in the economy has hurt the Menlo Atherton area.. my guess is that some folks might have had to let the gardener go, or at least cut back on his hours.