{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "When I went back to my hometown last Christmas it suddenly fit together in my mind a lot better as an integrated geography,...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/685849192585904128/", "html": "<p>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&rsquo;s car, anyway I&rsquo;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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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</p>"}