memory maps

The places of our childhood build maps deep within our hearts and minds, and they're a special sort of magic portal. Whether you've been there recently or not for a long time, you can picture them perfectly clearly, and a return visit instantly prompts acute familiarity and floods of memories.

Whether it's Grandma's house, your best friend's yard, where you lived in second grade, or even a store you went to with your mom every week. I have such a store in my town, and I don't go there super often anymore, but anytime I do, the nostalgia is strangely strong! Even though it's just a drugstore and nothing particularly notable ever really happened there in my childhood, other than visiting many, many times, for fun and for routine shopping needs, with my mom and sister.

Last year, I visited a family member’s house I hadn’t been in since I was eight or nine years old, and it was remarkably exactly the same as I remembered in so many ways. The colors, the layout, the textures and smell, the quality and sights of each room.

My best friend when I was six years old -- one of two at the time, my first best friends aside from my sister, aunts, and cousins -- had the coolest house I'd ever seen up to that point in my young life. When I think of it on occasion now, as an adult, I think it's probably still pretty incredibly cool; it wasn't just due to grandeur seen through a six year old’s eyes.

The vivid detail with which I still remember nearly every turn and layout in that home is amazing. It's been almost twenty years, certainly at least fifteen, since I've even been there. And yet, I can picture the spacious entry, that was always piled with dozens of kids shoes, the warm lighting, bunches of adults gathered around the doorway late at night, corralling kids and saying goodbyes. The laundry room, with its wicked cool laundry shoot, dropping down from upstairs, and the fancy washer and dryer and all the space.

The big living room with tall, vaulted ceilings and wooden beams, and the nights we sat on beanbags watching movies like The Incredibles, plus the Christmas morning we woke up there and sat in a big circle on the living room floor and couches, and I was astonished and full of awe over being given my own enormous stocking, full of presents, in someone else's house, even though they hadn't known we were coming with much advance notice!

I can picture the inviting kitchen, with a giant island everyone would gather around, the kind mom doing dishes and laughing over the sink, helping us get a piece of gum out of somebody's hair after the girls had been jumping on the bed and furniture upstairs too much, while chewing gum. Rinsing homegrown berries to eat. The big table, with chairs all around it. The nights everybody gathered and brought food, the surprise birthday present I got to open there, the portable DVD players of the early 2000s being pulled out for the kids. The Heelys and the freshly grown produce from the garden. So many things I learned there.

The office, right off the living room, with desks and Macs, where the parents and the kids had awesome creative rein and tools and fun on YouTube, and the room that was also the homeschooling hub. My introduction and instant love for both Spanish and sign language in that house. Learning how to knit on my fingers and being given my first skein of yarn. Racing through the house with lightsabers and the very eventful day my sister split her head open on the stone fireplace during a duel.

I remember the exact shape of the staircase, where it began and where it ended, popping out upstairs -- a house with an upstairs was the best thing I could imagine when I was six! The landing with floor-to-ceiling gorgeous bookcases, holding a rolling ladder, to reach the spines up high.

The directions the walkways stemmed off from there, and right where the girls' bedroom was, the exact colors and designs painted on the walls, the bunkbed and closet and comfy bowl chair, the pin point location of so many sleepovers, nighttime storytelling on the floor, and dressing Polly Pockets.

Right where the toy closet was off the hallway and stairs landing. The boys' bedroom, painted like a dark cave, with cool cubbies in the walls, painted to look like rocks, filled with boy things and more bunk beds and bean bags and terrariums with geckos. The bathroom, where we piled in to brush our teeth, I learned about zits, and I gazed at the cooler older sister's lovely earring collection in admiration.

I was infatuated and slightly scared of the top of the laundry shoot, where all the kids took turns climbing in through the door upstairs and shimmying down the shoot, with toes and fingers grabbing onto the interior trim, until we reached the bottom and popped out in the laundry room.

Upstairs, the family room with a tv in it (how many Veggie Tales did we watch on that tv??!) and the guest room and bathroom. Downstairs, I remember her mom and dad's room and painting our nails in there and watching my mom wrap Christmas presents on her mom's bed while her mom raced around getting ready and showered and dressed for whatever event.

I remember the grassy yard and the trampoline and the dogs and the swing set. I remember the long curving driveway and that time my little sister opened her car door from her car seat on the way up the drive, and it terrified my mom and we had child-locked doors from then on. I remember building teepees and forts in the yard, snowball fights, and looking at the sky through a telescope for the first time.

The backdrops for our youth carve a certain permanent map in our wiring, and they're often impossible to forget. It's so fascinating to me. What an impact that place and those people made on my young life. How incredible our brains are so intelligent and built for memories.

It feels so intimate, all these years later. It feels almost invasive, almost two decades later, to go back there in my mind, since the visuals and memories are so strong. It’s silly, but it feels like I’m looking in where I don’t have a right to, since we’ve been separate for so long. A family grew up there and a family still lives there now — it’s their home, not mine — and yet those precious pieces will always live inside my brain’s catalogue.

It makes me wonder if they know. If they realize how much that shaped my young mind, feelings, and memories.

It makes me curious how many people there are in the world, impacting each other in such profound and lasting ways, some without ever knowing it. When is it mutual, and when is it one sided? Do they remember all these things too?