When I went back to my hometown last Christmas it suddenly fit together in my mind a lot better as an integrated geography, whereas I think I had kind of first internalized it as a series of linear paths as seen from the passenger set of my mom’s car, anyway I’m just now realizing things, that it was concentric rings of similarly aged houses (at 7 blocks from the center of town I was really the furthest that could engage with it afoot), and by matching up the integrated geographic sense with – oh, this was actually one of the things that kind of first got me into cultural history, I guess as a result of growing around in this onetime colonial crossroads, since I was 13 I can tell what decade something was built on by instinct with pretty good accuracy for multiple centuries – I can reconstruct how and when the town bulged out in particular ways, I can relive in my mind the process of expansion that happened before I was born and left me this physical world I had just been taking for granted