I've always been a bit geographically-inclined. Once I've been somewhere, I rarely forget how to get there. I remember being in Toronto my sophomore year in high school, on a choir trip. A bunch of us set off from our hotel, walking around the city aimlessly. We visited an old cathedral, and passed several construction sites. I had never been to Toronto before, but I had no problem leading us back to where we started from.

Places and spaces stick in my mind, and define my world--especially roads and houses. Sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep, I'll flash upon a street in Korea, the road in front of the Wal-Mart-uh we used to go to, and I'll walk "home" to my apartment in Jungsan-ship-danjee in my head. Or, strangely, when I'm kissing someone, I often find myself mentally driving down Dietz Rd. in Ft. Oglethorpe, GA--the road my family took to get to the interstate, which wound by an old cemetery, a couple of ponds, a gas station, and my elementary-school principal's house, as well as intersected a street called Cinderella. I have to wonder what childhood experience formed that odd mental connection.

And I dream, most often, of being in houses I know. It could be the old house of my childhood friend Tiffany, on Pursley Rd.; or my family's basement when we lived on Country Ln.; or the Bishop's huge house on top of Lookout Mountain, that I used to clean for Merry Maids. For some reason, my memories of all the places I've cleaned seem especially clear to me, and they cycle through my dreams.

Over Christmas I made my aunt take me to my grandparent's old house--not the one in Collegedale, the one in Sequatchie Valley. I had spent a lot of time there as a kid, and it lived on in my mind as the most beautiful, amazing place--a smallish house with several tiny bedrooms, cluttered with plants and books, on a few acres of land bounded by a creek. There was a barn, filled with fascinating junk, and a swimming hole where I almost lost an eye running straight into a barbed wire fence.

After my grandparents' divorce, the house was left vacant for years, and sometime during its vacancy, pipes had burst. My aunt recalls the scene like something from a horror movie--mold and moss everywhere, rotting floorboards, and even dead vermin in the house. They almost had to gut the place when they remodeled it.

I visited it in December, halfway remodeled. It was strange. I could see the places where new boards had been put in, new light fixtures, paint jobs, etc. But overlaid on what I was seeing was my memory. I could see my grandma's paintings on the wall, and her embroidery of some phrase in Norwegian; I could see the organ in the corner, the dinner table, the ubiquitous doilies and house plants.

Walking back to the guest room I had slept in so many summers ago, I remembered it as a kind of haven; sleeping with the fan on, windows open, hearing crickets and frogs outside, warm under Grandma's afghan. One night I got up in the middle of the night, sneaked down the hall, outside through the front door, and met my cousins for some hijinks. I think we climbed trees and threw crabapples at passing cars. The guest room now was full of junk--books and pictures, waterstained, curling at the edges, stiffened and warped; broken furniture; old clothing and photo equipment. My sister and I found a driver's license of my grandma's from the 80's.

I decided after this experience that, when I have money, I want to invest in real estate. I'm sure it's a chore, fraught with hassles I haven't thought of yet, but I really love creating spaces. I want to buy my grandparent's old place and fix it up, turn it into an organic hobby farm, maybe, and live there someday. I want to buy Todd's house and rent it out to responsible college students, and have it be my summer home. Someday, when I'm really well off, I'll buy my Aunt Linda's house on Old Alabama Highway, the place with the pond and the courtyard, and live there, too! For now, I love too many places and am too poor, so I guess instead of buying them all and rotating through them during the year, I'll just dream about them, and write about them. I've already thought of a name for a book of short stories I want to write--Other People's Houses.