Nothing can put your place in the world into perspective quite like looking at an aerial photo of your own house can. Things have gotten to the point where, for almost any location on earth, you can find an aerial land photo which will show you a remarkable level of detail. When I looked at aerial photos of my neighborhood, I was surprised, and you will be too when you start to see them. Each aerial photo is absolutely sharp and picture perfect. I can even see the tree where I used to swing when I was a kid, and the ruins of the rotted out old sandbox. Forgive me for getting a bit maudlin at a time like this, but it really brings life into perspective to see it there, so small, and pasted up on your computer screen like that. When you start to look at an aerial photo of your own house, you will see just what I mean.

Looking at the aerial photo images made me think about how much smaller the world has gotten since I was a kid. We did not have a computer when I was growing up, and even if we had, we would not have been able to use it way back then to just get an aerial photo of anyplace in the world from Google. I swear, kids these days do not understand the extent of their luxuries. But I digress. Back in those days, everything seemed so big. The trees in the yard – the ones that are barely a dot on the aerial photo that I now have printed out and pasted on my wall – were as big as the sky themselves. I remember looking up from the grass underneath the big old beech tree, and being literally convinced that the top of it was in the sky.

Now, I can instantly call up an aerial photo of anyplace that I have never been, and this reminds me of when I was a kid too. We used to play such fantastic games of imagination, pretending that we were Arabian princes, or medieval adventurers, or even secret agents from some James Bond movie. Looking at an aerial photo, I feel that way again in a different way, as the whole world appears to be a click away, sitting right at my fingertips whenever I want it to be there. It is almost like being a superhero.

Plenty of places online to check out aerial photos, Google Maps, Zillow.com are just a couple.