I was watching a piece about Rosland Cash, daughter of Johnny Cash, on CBS’s Sunday Morning today. She had a picture of herself sitting on the porch where they lived in Memphis as a toddler. And now that she is a very grown up, she went and sat in the same place and had another picture taken. It was a nice. To see yourself like an article in a magazine article, complete with the labels of then and now. It made me think. Every house from my toddler-hood is physically gone.
The city of Chicago decided that the two-flat that I came home to as a baby was sitting on property that needed to be turned into a playground for a school. So, when I was seven years old, we moved to another two-flat at the western edge of the city, just outside of Cicero.
The house that was hand built by my great grandfather and his friends was torn down a couple of years ago down in Virginia to make way for a water pumping station.
So, there isn’t a place in existence that I could go to and make a picture of the before and after echo of me. I guess I didn’t become famous enough fast enough to save the old homesteads. Just as well, if I could see them today, I probably wouldn’t enjoy it.
Barnesversation 
That may have been a blessing. A few years back, I drove past the house where I grew up and it was a shambles! The grass was overgrown, the paint on the house was peeling, there was junk cars in the driveway, and it looked like noone had lived there for years. It made me sad to see the place where I grew up and had so many fond memories looking so trashed and un-cared for.