This is pretty cool. Tornwordo over at Sticky Crows has Googled his childhood home and challenged others to do the same. This is the house I lived in from the time I was 5 years old until after my parents divorced and Mama moved us away from Gainesville. I was 9, I think, when we left here. It's the first address I learned, and I'll probably be able to recite the address when I'm 99 years old.
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It looks very different now from the way I remember it. Evidently the neighborhood was relatively young when we lived there. These trees are huge! They were nowhere near this big when I lived there. It's very weird to look at this neighborhood now. Very weird.
After doing a bit of a search remembering what little I know, I found this:
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This is the house I lived in before moving to the one in Gainesville. This place looks so depressing! It's in St. Petersburg. We had no air conditioning. My baby brother was born here in March of 1966. Just looking at this house depresses me. Does that mean I was even depressed when I was 4 years old?? I blame my father. Not because he was a bad father, necessarily. He wasn't, really. No, he's the one who passed down the genetic predisposition to depression. I also inherited my allergies from him. What a legacy!
This is the house I lived in when I graduated from high school. It's in Orlando, the Pine Hills area. That neighborhood is now known as a very dangerous place to live, but it wasn't quite so bad when we lived there. It was just beginning to get ugly.
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Odd, whereas the trees are huge at the house I lived in when I started kindergarten, the trees at this address (where I lived when I graduated high school) have been removed. There was a very large juniper tree right there where that little thing is peeking over the garbage cans. My room was the last window on the right, and there was a large citrus tree in front of it. There were two very nice trees about where that flower bed thing is in the middle of the yard. Even when we lived there those trees had a lot of damage. Bugs or something, I think. I'm not surprised they are gone.
This is the first nice-ish place Superman and I lived. We moved here shortly after I graduated from college (the first time).
This isn't the exact unit we lived in, but ours looked pretty much like this. We lived in the 2 story unit to the left. Those little one story units were very nice one bedroom apartments. The 2 story ones had 2 bedrooms and a bath upstairs, and a large living room, dining room, and small kitchen downstairs. These apartments were built during the post war housing boom in the late 40s. They were pretty old but very well built. It was a nice place to live. I'd love to see them now. I wonder if they've done any significant updating. When we lived there the whole unit was carpeted except the bathroom and kitchen, even though the floors under the carpet were hardwood. The carpet was nasty, too. Just this side of shag. And very brown.
What about you? I challenge you to Google your childhood home and see if the street view is available. Then show it on your blog and tell a little bit about your memories of the place.
