“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you came from on a map.  All those places where you lived are just that: places.  You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events.  And those are mapped in memory.  Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are.  Almost not born at every turn.  Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots.  Stories shading into one another.  You come from [stories…events…people].”

-Anne Marie McDonald in The Way the Crow Flies

In Des Moines

• The basement apartment
• The Washington Street house, earliest memories

Me at the Washington Street house…on the Anderson-Erikson Dairy  milkbox

• 1310 York Street, 2 doors down from Grandma Baker
• 1723 York Street, the first one my parents ever bought (across the alley and one street over from Aunt Rosie)

In Davenport

• 3536 Jersey Ridge Road, the acreage with ponds and baseball games
• 5506 North Howell

In  Cedar Rapids

• the “parsonage” on some street I can’t recall

In Robert, La

• “the parsonage” on highway 190 east of Hammond
• with Ginger (and Miss Clara for a few weeks)

In Gary

• 4995 Roosevelt Place

In Minot

• Dorm Room
• Trailer in married student housing park
• barn-shaped house

In Kokomo

• 1106 Armstrong Street

In Sioux City

• Leeds neighborhood house for one week (house had major problems ;[ )
• Jackson Street-the yellow house
• across from school, our first house to ever buy, huge!

In Norfolk (don’t ask)

• N 10th, loved this house
• N 13th, historical Victorian, loved it, too
• Park Place, just passing through
• “orange” house, endured
• “Bob” Nebraska, torture (not the house, the season)

In Denver

• Acoma Street house (where we had “Graceland Home School”)

In Brighton

• Pheasant Ridge, land of grandbebes

There was actually some zig and some zag between some of these.  But these are all just houses.  They aren’t where I am from, though I enjoy looking at them again via Google-maps.  They are just places I lived.  Home is where my heart is.  And where my heart is held with great care

Where thou art ~ that ~ is home.  Emily Dickenson

“It’s anywhere I’ll ever go and everywhere I’ve been