I used to live at 4505 South White Cherry Way in West Valley, Utah. My parents moved to West Valley in the middle of third grade and I stayed in that home until I married Mike. My mom sold that house several years ago, so it’s off limits to me now. A nice young family lives there now, embedding more happy memories into its walls.

My friend, Sceverenia, lived just down the street, also on White Cherry Way. Her parents sold their house and moved down south to Fairview a few years ago. I think about their house a lot and I keep dreaming about it. When we were teenagers, we used to beep our horns when we drove past each others’ houses. “Hello!” the horn would say.

To this day, Mike’s family still lives on Palmer Drive. I tell him how lucky he is that his parents still live in the house that he grew up in. We visit every few Sundays. Sometimes after the weekend visit, we drive past my old home on White Cherry. They wrapped the bushes out front with “Caution” tape for the winter. The three little bushes look like tiny murder scenes with all that yellow tape. I refrain from beeping past Scev’s house. It’s vacant and the real estate sign taunts me, “Your childhood is up for sale…AGAIN.”

Google Maps just added satellite images to their Maps feature. To this day, I use the old West Valley address when I test things. When I typed it in, I felt the rush of it all. There’s my house. There’s Scev’s house. There’s Mike’s house. There’s the house that Matt Strebe lived in when his mom was married to Bud. There’s Mike Pinkston’s house. There’s Chuck’s house. There’s Dylan’s house. There’s Kennedy Junior High. There’s Academy Park Elementary. There’s Hunter Elementary. There’s the Circle K where Scev and I sluffed school for the first time. There’s the Holiday Oil where Pinkston blocked my Beetle with his huge Ford 450 so I couldn’t leave. My whole life was in that one square. My world was that small.

Ironically, the largest single lot of land in the square is the cemetery…