I’ve found that when, in RL, I start going through too many old photos I begin to get too depressed to function for a while. That’s been happening to me lately, and I suspect it’s worse because my RL wedding anniversary will be in a couple weeks. It would have been eight years this month, but on that day instead of eight years of marriage,  I will have been looking at almost eight months of widowhood. I don’t want to think about that, so I dive into the old photos and try to relive happier times, but I think I just miss my husband more with every photo I see.

I sometimes find that it’s just as hard to look through my old SL shots of his avatar, or the two of us together. It may not be the RL us, but for each shot I can remember what we were doing, whether it was some fun little random moment at home, or out exploring. And for each shot we were together, a few feet apart, in RL. We were constantly looking over each other’s shoulders to see what was going on. I miss that terribly. Every time I go in world I miss him. I want to take him to fun new places, and watch him find spots I never thought of exploring.

Given that I’ve been feeling sad for the past few days you wouldn’t think I’d want to dive into nostalgic photos of our early days in Second Life, but I just felt like doing that today. Maybe it was the idea of “Throwback Thursday” that inspired me, I see people on blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, posting with that theme every week. so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. So back I go to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when particle clouds floated in non-Windlit skies, and ad farms were cultivated all over the mainland.

The old home site. Looks a bit empty these days.

Every now and then I like to go back to the first parcel we ever owned, just to see what it looks like these days. I should have thought of this last month, as it was right around the first of May in 2007 that we decided we really needed to own land. Technically the first land program was still in effect when we joined, but it was never available so we went shopping for a suitable little 512 parcel and eventually found one that wasn’t too pricey, and was bordered on one side by what would eventually be a Linden road. These days there’s nothing there and it has been abandoned to Governor Linden, but back in May of 2007 it was a little green patch amid flashy nightclub supply places, resorts, and big stores.

Almost the same angle as the pic above…

Still, it was all ours and we loved our little patch of land. We happily rezzed a cottage from the library, moved it around a few times, eventually built a privacy screen at the sides and back, then finally moved up into the air, where my hub re-textured the cottage and built a turret, with a little library inside.

But the best part was the giant flexi earthworm hanging out under the platform

We kept the first plot for about five months before selling it off to the guy with the giant store across the road, and moved to a larger spot. At first I just rezzed the old house, then we began building our own hobbit hole, and I kept trying to set up garden spots with just Linden trees and freebie landscaping items. It may be a little cheesy by today’s standards, but at the time I was just excited to be building stuff and I didn’t care how bad it looked, it was all wonderful and fun.

In a hole in the ground lived two avatars

We spent tons of time in world in the early days, just building anything and everything we could think of, then deleting it and trying something else. Part of it was because the ability to make stuff was just so much fun we couldn’t resist it, part of it was we were super stingy. If I wanted something to decorate with we hated to spend money on it, at least in those early days, so we tried to make things ourselves. Some of the biggest joys of my second life were watching my husband get absorbed in creating something.  As he started experimenting with making sculpts he decided to build a tree house. I actually quite miss the little tree house, I think if I had my own land I’d be tempted to fish around in his inventory and rez some of these things, just for nostalgia’s sake.

With fab particle clouds, and spinning ad signs too! Woot!

Much like the first, the area around our second land is mostly empty these days although a large build sits in about the middle point of where our land was. I looked around for a bit, but I didn’t want to loiter too long because there were people about on their own property and they were probably wondering what sort of trouble I might get up to, just standing around on the road, so I flew away.

A lot of the land around where we had the second home was up for sale, though some was at a steep price for a landlocked bit of mainland. Part of me considered the cheaper parcel for a little while, I’m not premium anymore but I’ve contemplated going premium again to get a little plot of my own. I’m not really sure I’d want to live on either of our old sims again, though. Too many memories of the things we built, and all the fun we had there. I have enough trouble wandering through my city in RL and finding spots that remind me of my husband, I’m not sure I want to have that be any more of a thing in SL than it already is.

Still, it was fun to look back, and remember how excited we were about everything in those early days. It was a nice little trip down memory lane.

If only First Life were as easy.