GUY ON REDEFINED SPACE

CHANGING LIFESPACE

My aunt drove me. It wasn't far—there's little that's far in a modestly sized Midwestern city. But it was off to a less frequented corner of town, as I was able to recognize now that I'm old enough to understand a map. My parents can't have been all that hip to have lived there.

"My goodness, it sure looks different! Wasn't it green? I don't like the new paint job," I said as we pulled up in front of the tiny frame house that had seemed so big back when I was so small.

"Well sure, I don't remember," said my aunt, parking nearby but not right out front so as not to alarm the current inhabitants if they were home.

We walked up, but we didn't walk right up. Approaching an old, once so familiar space after an absence of many years, one takes one's time. I took an odd path full of curves and hesitations, to get (eventually) to the front door and the screened-in porch where I'd once sat to watch thunderstorms.

It was all different. It's funny how spaces that were intensely familiar in bygone years are redefined when you experience them again. Some parts of this old home came back to me again alike, if not the same: the lawn, which I'd half forgotten but spent so much time on, was only altered in perception, by seeming so much smaller than it once did. Other parts were quite literally redefined, however. An extension had wiped out the back patio, making it Inside Space now, not Outside Space.

The new inhabitants let us in, and I got to see once again the living room—really just a living alcove!—the dining area, and particularly the upstairs attic, where I'd lived and which had been a storage space before my father and my aunt's then-boyfriend took to it and redefined it as the boys' bedroom. This was yet another change in space: in broad strokes, the attic was unaltered from my memory, yet it was now completely unrecognizable to me. There were too many shifts in dressing, perception, and milieu for me to be able to draw the temporal line from then to now.

We thanked the fellow who'd showed us around and drove off to find lunch, a great space in my memoryscape now redefined forever.