I recently received an email from Chris, an old friend of the family who babysat me and my two siblings throughout our impressionable years. He had used a hand-held camera to record a television playing a video he had taken in 1993. It was a house tour of our childhood home in Milwaukee.

Photo By Historic Milwaukee, Inc

I grew up in a small three-bedroom house on a quiet, dead-end street in Riverwest, a neighborhood known for its artists and activists and as one of the only diverse neighborhoods in a very segregated city. The small brick house had blue siding and a bright red door, and behind the backyard was the forest. The Milwaukee River, at that point, separates the city from the suburb of Shorewood and the banks were reachable by trails right behind our house. It was a preserve in the middle of a major metropolitan area: a place to walk the dog off-leash, a place to play hide and seek, a place to spy humans across the water and scream "Bonjour!," while waving your hands wildly after your friends convince you that France lay across the water. We moved when I was 15 and I still miss it.

I watched the video Chris sent with rapt concentration and remembered the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish sweatshirt I was wearing, grimaced at a horrifying moment when my eleven-year-old-self tried to eat an entire breast of chicken without cutting it and marveled at my dear old dad, skinny and with a head full of curly black hair, not a wisp of gray in sight.

And then I started noticing little things that resembled my current apartment. The floor! I completely forgot that we had a black and white checked kitchen floor. Granted I didn't install the flooring in my apartment but it did play a big role in my choice of this unit.

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