The Street I Still Remember

I have not lived on Linden Avenue for six years. I remember it more vividly than the street I live on now.

This is not a failure of present attention, though it might look like one. I pay attention to my current neighborhood — I walk its blocks, I learn its rhythms, I have my regular spots and my irregular discoveries. But Linden Avenue occupies a different category of memory. It is not recalled; it is re-inhabited. When I think of it, I do not see it from outside, as a photograph or a map. I am on it — walking, climbing the front steps, turning the key in a lock that probably no longer exists because the building was sold and the locks were changed, as locks are.

Linden Avenue was a street of porches. This is the first thing I tell people, though no one has asked. Every house had a porch — some grand, with columns and rocking chairs, others modest, a slab of concrete with a single step. In summer, porches were where life happened: conversations between neighbors, children with popsicles, the slow performance of evening arrival as people came home from work and settled into their outdoor rooms before retreating inside for the night.

My apartment was on the second floor of a house that had been divided into units decades ago. The porch belonged to the first-floor tenants — a couple who grew tomatoes in pots and waved at me when I passed. I could hear their television through the floor on winter nights, a muffled soundtrack to my solitude. It was not intrusive. It was company of a kind — evidence that other lives were being lived in parallel, separated by wood and plaster and the thin agreements of shared housing.

There was a maple tree on the corner that turned a color in October I have not seen replicated anywhere else — not because the color was impossible, but because the color was mine. It belonged to my autumns on Linden, my walks to the bus, my returns home in the dark when the streetlamps made the leaves look like they were lit from within. I have seen other maples since. They are fine maples. They are not that maple.

I returned once, three years after moving. I told myself it was because I was in the area, which was true in the logistical sense and false in every other sense. I was in the area because I needed to see whether the street still existed or whether it had been a fabrication of my nostalgia — a place too coherent to be real, too vivid to be accurate.

It existed. It was smaller than I remembered — streets do this, compress in memory until you return and find they are just streets, normal scale, normal proportions. The maple was still on the corner, though shorter than my memory of it, which meant it had been pruned or my memory had been exaggerating, or both. The porch with the tomatoes was now a porch with succulents. The couple was gone. A young man sat on the steps wearing headphones, and he did not wave.

I walked the length of the block once, slowly, like someone visiting a museum of their own past. The house numbers were the same. The cracks in the sidewalk were in familiar places, though there were new cracks I did not recognize — the street continuing its slow decay and repair without consulting me. I did not knock on my old door. I did not have a reason that would not sound absurd: I used to live here. I used to be a person who turned this key, climbed these stairs, looked out this window. I am someone else now, but part of me is still there, and I wanted to see if the building could feel it.

It could not, or it did not show it. Buildings are not sentimental. They house whoever comes, and they do not keep records of who left. I walked back to my car — I had driven, which felt like a betrayal of the street's pedestrian spirit — and sat for a moment before starting the engine. I was mourning something. Not the street itself, which was fine, which was thriving in its quiet way. I was mourning my presence on it — the version of me who belonged to Linden Avenue and was belonged to by it in return.

I still remember the street. Not as it is now — I have only one data point for now, three years stale. I remember it as it was when I lived there: porch-lit, maple-shaded, permeated by the sound of other people's televisions and the smell of tomatoes growing in pots and the particular quality of October air that I have been chasing ever since without knowing that's what I'm doing.

Memory is not fair to the present. It amplifies what is gone and dims what is here. I know this. I live on a different street now, and I am trying to give it the attention I gave Linden before I knew that attention was finite — before I understood that you can live on a street for years and then leave, and the street will continue without you, and you will continue without the street, but something will persist in both directions: a ghost geography, a map drawn in feeling rather than ink.

Linden Avenue is that map for me. I still remember it. I suspect I always will.