The Map

Blow up to enlarge (I hope) if you want to see the whole story!
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This is the first 12 years of my life. Actually 13 but that last year was actually the beginning of the next chapter. In this six block area, I spent 99% of my days.

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I made this map today because I am taking a three Saturday workshop on how to write a memoir (versus a personal essay versus an autobiography. Want to know the difference? Maybe I will write about it. )

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This is an awesome workshop: seven women, all wanting to or have begun writing "memoirs." I don't know what I will do, but it was pretty insightful to draw this map. It's my neighborhood. The house that has an 'X' on it is the house my father and his father built together, along with my Uncle Sammy, my father's construction partner and half brother.

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I lived first and foremost on "the lane". Jeannie and Janice lived across the street and we played with our Ginny dolls on their front stoop for several years. Their stepmother was a wicked witch.

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I look at this map and I am struck by the simple pleasures of my childhood: 35 cents every day of summer to buy ice cream in a cup; walking by myself to LaRosa's to buy milk for my mother; sitting in my favorite corner seat of the playground making potholders--I probably made 50 potholders one summer.

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And I see some hints at understanding the little girl who ran away and hid in the garage and waited for her mother to come and find her (she didn't); the kid who watched in disbelief when the ice cream truck backed up and ran over her bike; the not-yet-teen who joined her 12 or so 7th grade friends of boys and girls learning and practicing how to kiss eachother.
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This was a look back. It seems I haven't really done that before, at least not as a bona-fide map, and I'm pondering what I know now. It's going to fit in somewhere, I know that.