The first home I remember living in is the one pictured below, at the approximate location of the marker. I lived in this house from the age of about 1 until age 7, at which point my family pulled up stakes and moved to Canada. I have some memories of this house but, as mentioned in the last post, I'm slowly pulling some new ones out of the deep troughs of my ancient past. When I think about this house, the first thing I always remember is a somewhat strange and often repeated dream. In the dream, I would slowly float down the staircase, which faced the front door. Near the bottom of the stairs, I would stop and slowly rotate to the left, where I would scrutinize the pattern on the wallpaper, which was a kind of fine fleur-de-lis pattern. I'd always have a slight chill at this point, a little bit of anxiety about what was behind that wall (which in truth was nothing more than a dark and empty living room (there was no cellar in the house, but there was a coal bunker -- did the dark and unoccupied midnight living room stand in for Bachelard's cellar? Maybe.). Then I'd float the rest of the way down the stairs, past the front room and then onward to my parents' bedroom which was located just behind the front room. After each episode of the dream, I would awaken in my parents' bed, so clearly there was some sleepwalking involved. It interests me a lot that this passage from my bed to my parents' bed is so deeply etched for me, but other elements of the story remind me of what others have been saying here. I was preoccupied with the pattern on the wallpaper (I wonder if all parents know how important wall coverings are to kids -- why is that? I have some ideas for later). In a way, I did see the route from bed to bed as a series of snapshots, but I had some sense of the motion between the views. But although I felt the motion in my dream, I was floating passively, not under my own control. There's more that I remember from this early house, and more memories still will emerge once I've had more of a chance to debrief my siblings, but I'll have to reflect much more on how, if at all, the shape of this home influenced my later preferences and my feelings.
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