Memory Maps
A few months ago, I participated in a Place Changing workshop where one of the exercises was to sketch our neighborhoods from memory.
The idea of mapping the physical spaces we inhabit with our families by memory, where we establish shallow roots and call home, was evocative and a nostalgic and personally bittersweet challenge. Core values are made apparent in a very physical way when we decide were to live within a city. Thoughts on density, scale, transit, school zoning, medical access, proximity to food, housing age, lot size, price, wildlife, activities, amenities, et. al. are clarified and prioritized; compromises are likely made. We declare our identities by where we live, and where we establish "home" shapes our identities. It is an intimate peek into a person's aspirations or situation - physical location becomes a meter for how tracking lives are meant to be lead. Babies are born and brought home. Life is celebrated, grown, and lost. Using memory as a lens to draw this out was illuminating - the best and the worst bits of where we live within our city were quickly teased out onto paper. Each of us then explained our maps, highlighting what was drawn and why we lived there.
This notion of one's physical location with a city as a critical framework for Home and Identity resonated with me. As a part of a military family, opportunities to establish new roots in new places are frequent. My response to this exercise was done in two memory maps - one of my old home and one my new home. The map of our San Antonio neighborhood, sketched after having moved almost a year and a half earlier, is certainly colored by nostalgia and longing. Our time in that particular place, with that particular creek, grocery, house that we bought painted landscaped loved, brought puppies home, hardware store, parks, sweet neighbors, walks, runs, deer, plant-lady, voting, food, and friendships will get fuzzier and sweeter as I continue to look back - to me, this was a neighborhood like no other in San Antonio and it was a wonderfully easy place to call home. When we first moved, we probably selected our house and neighborhood a bit naively and during our time there I loved to bother Charles by doing extensive Zillow research on houses in different San Antonio neighborhoods, projecting our lives onto alternate locations around the city. Who would we be if we lived in Dignowity? In Southtown? In Monte Vista? In Terrell Hills? How would our lifestyle change? What would our Tuesday nights look like? What would our Saturday mornings look like? Oy vey, poor Charles.
Our frequent moves could be a good thing in this light, as they create unique opportunities for testing out how lives can be shaped, even briefly, by where you inhabit the city. We may not have agency over the cities that we relocate to, but we can affect where we live within them. I love asking newly-met people for their neighborhoods in the Augusta area - unspoken volumes of information are conveyed through simple responses. At the moment, I do not bother Charles with questions of new neighborhoods within Augusta - I am simply getting to know our sweet, current one better. We have already moved to a different neighborhood within the city in the short time we have been here, to a different home with character and history, closer to downtown, along a lake, adjacent to trails, full of wildlife, interesting plants, and natural light, near multiple grocery stores and our friends. I move with greater ease and familiarity through the streets and spaces near my home; street names, trees, intersections, people, and neighborhood quirks are becoming easier to recall with increasing clarity. The inter-neighborhood move has been well worth it, and our Saturday mornings are just fine.
